Collaborative Development of Educational Modules - E-Infrastructures and Technologies for Lifelong Learning - page 201

Figure 7. Conceptual model for mutation analysis

representations. First and second slides of Figure
8 illustrate how the different knowledge categories
of the Application state were implemented in the
SofTest module.
Next, we had to determine the instructional
elements. In the case of SoftTest, only explana-
tory and exploratory elements were considered.
Consider, for instance, the exercise represented
by the state ApplicationMA:exercise:text. Basi-
cally, it consists of the application of mutation
analysis to test the factorial program. Explana-
tory elements, included to provide some help for
solving the exercise, were represented by the states
FactorialImplementation:complementary:figure
and FactorialHintMA:complementary:figure.
Some required tools for doing the exercise were
modeled too. The Coweb:tool state represents the
CoWeb collaborative learning environment (Die-
berger & Guzdial, 2003), used as a discussion
space among learners and instructors. The
Proteum:tool state corresponds to the Proteum
testing tool (Delamaro et al., 2001), used for ap-

plying mutation analysis. The third slide of Figure
8 illustrates the proposed exercise regarding the
mutation analysis application.
The last step consisted of defining the se-
quences for presenting all the components of the
knowledge domain. Figure 9 illustrates part of the
didactic model (only the instructional items are
represented) for mutation analysis; it corresponds
to an open specification, in which all possible
sequences of presentation among the modeled
objects are represented. Consider, for instance,
the MutationAnalysisDetails state. By exploring
the notion of DD states, the MutationAnalysis-
Details substates (OR DD states) - MutantOperator,
MutantGeneral, MutationScore, Application and
ApproachesGeneral - are all connected to each
other by implicit transitions, responsible for es-
tablishing the navigation paths among them. So,
from MutantOperator we can get to the states
MutantGeneral, MutationScore, Application and
ApproachesGeneral (and vice versa). Similarly,
consider the Mutant state. From Mutant we are