Articulate Virtual Laboratories for Science and Engineering Education

为科学与工程教育打造虚拟实验室

• 批准号: 9453078
• 负责人: Kenneth Forbus
• 金额: $ 90.11万
• 依托单位: Northwestern University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 1995
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 1995-04-15 至 2000-05-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=9453078&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Articulate; Virtual; Laboratories; Science; Engineering

9453078 Forbus The goal of this project is to develop articulate virtual laboratories (AVLs) that teach science and engineering principles by scaffolding and coaching students in conceptual design tasks. The educational conjecture we are testing is that articulate virtual laboratories will enable students to (a) learn fundamental principles radically be better than they would otherwise be unable to perform. To test these conjectures, our prototype laboratories will be used by engineering undergraduates from Northwestern University and Oxford University as part of their course work, and by high school students from Evanston Township High School. We believe that articulate virtual laboratories could dramatically improve engineering and science education. Design experience is essential to engineering education, and provides a powerful motivating context for learning fundamental physical principles: One cannot design a jet engine, refrigerator, or power plant without using a broad range of physical principles. Design environments that scaffold students, allowing them to focus on fundamentals, could prove invaluable for instruction in basic science as well as engineering, and could better motivate interest in science learning. Design experiences are difficult to provide in typical classroom settings, because many interesting physical artifacts (such as power plants, jet engines, and refrigerators) are expensive or dangerous to build and experiment with. Articulate virtual laboratories will address these problems by enabling students to design, analyze, and test artifacts in a simulated environment, cheaply and safely. They will provide coaching for students, in order to help them understand fundamental principles, to help them practice the skills needed to model, analyze, and design physical systems, and to provide the kind of supervision that a good laboratory assistant provides by way of minimizing unenlightening aspects of student explorations. Creating art iculate virtual laboratories requires synthesizing advances involving several AI technologies. Qualitative physics provides formal representations for the tacit knowledge of scientists and engineers that connects their professional knowledge to their experience-based intuitions, enabling software to use methods and concepts similar to those deemed natural by domain experts. Compositional modeling provides representations and reasoning techniques for computer-assisted modeling (e.g., how to apply professional knowledge of a domain to modeling real-world situations so that they can be formally analyzed). Truth- maintenance systems provide reasoning services and the raw material for constructing explanations of the system's results and reasoning in terms that help students understand the domain of study. Symbolic algebra and constraint propagation provide mathematical solutions. Analogical processing techniques provide the ability to retrieve and apply results from libraries of worked out designs and examples to notel situations, in order to coach students. We are developing two prototype articulate virtual laboratories, in collaboration with engineering faculty at Northwestern University and at Oxford University who are willing to use them with their students. The first concerns thermodynamic cycles, an idealization used in the conceptual design of power plants, propulsion systems, refrigeration systems, and heat pumps. To master the design and analysis of thermodynamic cycles requires a deep understanding of a substantial body of thermodynamic. The second concerns feedback controllers. The concepts of feedback and control theory permeate modern science and engineering. While mathematical analyses are required to design optimal controllers, we believe that many of the important concepts of feedback could be grasped by high school students, given appropriate scaffolding. ***

小行星9453078 这个项目的目标是开发清晰的虚拟实验室（AVL），通过搭建脚手架和指导学生完成概念设计任务来教授科学和工程原理。 我们正在测试的教育猜想是，清晰的虚拟实验室将使学生能够（a）从根本上学习基本原理，比他们无法执行的要好。 为了测试这些设备，我们的原型实验室将被西北大学和牛津大学的工程专业本科生作为他们课程工作的一部分，并由埃文斯顿镇高中的高中生使用。 我们相信，清晰的虚拟实验室可以大大改善工程和科学教育。设计经验对于工程教育至关重要，并为学习基本物理原理提供了强大的激励背景：如果不使用广泛的物理原理，就无法设计喷气发动机、冰箱或发电厂。设计环境，支架学生，让他们专注于基础知识，可以证明在基础科学以及工程教学的宝贵，可以更好地激发科学学习的兴趣。设计经验很难在典型的课堂环境中提供，因为许多有趣的物理工件（如发电厂，喷气发动机和冰箱）的构建和实验是昂贵或危险的。Articulate虚拟实验室将通过使学生能够在模拟环境中设计，分析和测试文物，廉价，安全地解决这些问题。他们将为学生提供辅导，以帮助他们理解基本原理，帮助他们练习建模，分析和设计物理系统所需的技能，并提供一个好的实验室助理通过尽量减少学生探索的无启发性方面提供的监督。 创建艺术化的虚拟实验室需要综合涉及多种人工智能技术的进步。定性物理为科学家和工程师的隐性知识提供了形式化的表示，将他们的专业知识与基于经验的直觉联系起来，使软件能够使用与领域专家认为自然的方法和概念类似的方法和概念。 组合建模提供了用于计算机辅助建模的表示和推理技术（例如，如何将领域的专业知识应用于对真实世界的情况进行建模，以便可以对它们进行形式化分析）。真值维护系统提供推理服务和原始材料，用于构建系统结果的解释和推理，帮助学生理解学习领域。 符号代数和约束传播提供了数学解决方案。类比处理技术提供了检索和应用结果的能力，从图书馆的设计和例子，以notel情况，以指导学生。 我们正在开发两个原型清晰的虚拟实验室，与西北大学和牛津大学的工程学院合作，他们愿意与学生一起使用。第一个是热力循环，这是一种用于发电厂、推进系统、制冷系统和热泵概念设计的理想化方法。掌握热力循环的设计和分析需要对大量的热力学知识有深刻的理解。第二个是反馈控制器。反馈和控制理论的概念渗透到现代科学和工程中。 虽然需要数学分析来设计最优控制器，但我们相信，如果给予适当的支架，高中生可以掌握反馈的许多重要概念。 ***