Layered development and evaluation for intelligent support in exploratory environments: the case of microworlds

This paper focuses on microworlds, a special type of Exploratory Learning Environment, where students freely interact with the system to create their own models and constructions. Most microworlds developed so far provide integrated scaffolds to help students’ learning process, but the nature of the interaction makes it difficult to design, develop and evaluate explicit adaptive support according to students’ needs. Building on previous work in the field, this paper proposes a layered approach that simplifies the development and allows both formative and summative evaluation of the different components of the system. As a case study, we present the development of intelligent support for a microworld in the MiGen project, and discuss its evaluation that includes both technical and pedagogical experts of the team