Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
4 Direct Execution and Playful Learning
Webbles representing any computable function or any operator may be directly
manipulated on the screen-in accordance with Shneiderman's paradigm [17] of
direct manipulation-and plugged one into the other for exploratory learning.
Because every meme media object representing some computable function is not
only representing, but
implementing
the function, more features are available.
The meme media implementation provided (see section before) meets the require-
ments of so-called
direct execution
, a term coined by Fujima and Jantke in [6].
Direct execution has some varying aspects. First of all, it means that a meme
media object fed with data is able to run immediately. Second, it refers to the
completion of meme media objects. Think of some incomplete definition of a
computable function which has input data sitting in their respective positions,
but some part of the definition being not yet completed. As soon as the missing
meme media objects are plugged in, the completed object is ready to run and
executes the computation immediately.
Direct execution is an interesting refinement of direct manipulation which,
after its introduction by [6], surely needs some more in-depth investigation and
some m ore comprehensive experimentation.
In the present application case, direct execution allows for some type of playful
exploratory learning as follows. Learners are given some composite media object
not yet fully defined (see left object in figure 2). Input data (in this case 3 and 5)
are sitting in place. The task is to complete the definition such that the resulting
composite media object implements a certain target behavior (in this case adding
any 2 input numbers). When a particular syntactically correct media object is
inserted, the completed objects executes the computation as shown above. Now,
it is ready for experimental validation.
Fig. 2.
Direct manipulation at work-some toy example before and after plugging in
