Indie

Indie is a software toolkit for building hybrid Investigate and Decide (Indie) learning environments. In Indie learning environments, students can run simulated experiments, construct reports arguing for different claims, and submit these reports for critiquing. The Indie learning environment is one example of the Goal-based Scenario (GBS) learn-by-doing environments. A previous version of Indie was developed in Lisp by the Institute of Learning Sciences (ILS) at Northwestern University. Examples of old Indie systems have been self-contained software-based learning environments. The content of the learning environments is always pre-defined, which leaves little space for open-ended activities. We overcome this problem by creating a new architecture for hybrid Indie learning environments that provide the option for human coaching in the learning environments. This brings the possibility of having open-ended activities in GBS's as well as the opportunity for incrementally augmenting the content at instruction time.

Our new version of Indie is a content-independent tool in Java that includes an authoring tool and a runtime learning environment. We used Indie to build the Corrosion Investigator application, a learning environment for engineering undergraduates in the domain of biofilms. In the learning environment, students take the role of consultants to help a company determine the cause of pipe corrosion. Students need to make conscious decisions about which tests to run and which test results support the claims they make in order to solve the problem in a timely and economical manner. This requires students fully understand the purposes of the tests and the implication of the test results. To create a specific application, such as Corrosion Investigator, an author creates HTML documents and images for the splash screen, challenge document, background reference material, and an XML file describing the tests students can perform, the results those tests can produce in general, and will produce in the current scenario, and the possible diagnoses that students has to argue for and against.

Indie can create Investigate and Decide learning environments for any domain where diagnostic evidence-based reasoning is appropriate. We aim to have teachers in different domains use Indie to build various Investigate and Decide learning environments.

* Corrosion Investigator Demo

Members

  • Lin Qiu
  • Chris Riesbeck
    •  Please send questions and comments to qiu@cs.northwestern.edu

    This work was supported primarily by the Engineering Research Centers Program of the National Science Foundation under Award Number EEC-9876363