Object-Oriented Modeling in science and technology education: Design and evaluation of a modeling concept for courses in physics and technology and for educational media production

How do students create internal models when they learn about physics? This is long since a major topic in physics education. Since the importance (whilst not the principles) of internal modeling is commonly understood, a vastness of model creation tools for physics education exist. But modeling is a topic that runs way across the bounds of physics, and physics education, alone. In my work, I compared the modeling principles and modeling tools of physics and technology education and of computational science in their present form and in their development across the past decades. In accordance to its focus towards quantitative description of patterns in natural behavior, Physics science and Physics education covers a wide range of sophisticated models and modeling tools with aim towards mathematical description. This comes along with a renown competence in software modeling and simulation. Technical and engineering science use physical modeling as well; in addition, they face the challenge to describe huge technical systems in a commonly understandable fashion, e.g. to forster the cooperative work of teams or specialists with different background on the same project. Thus, technical science has developed normative rules for model generation and graphical description, e.g. in the Norm VDI 2222. Perhaps the most dynamic development of modeling techniques and modeling tools took place in computer science. I found a fasttrack development of modeling techniques rising from early control flow diagrams up to modern object-oriented modeling techniques using a normed and well defined Unified Modeling Language, UML. My approach was to tailor the modeling tools and principles of technical and computer science for the use in physics and technology education, and in the important field of media design for this educational fields. Thus, I derived a simplified form of UML, called the didactical Unified Modeling Language dUML. Furthermore, I adopted the principle of object-oriented modeling and design for the use in physics and technology education. To test my approach, I prepared, guided and evaluated a group of five practival implementations: 1.The production of instructional media for higher education in the Project Komponentenorientierte Lernsoftwareentwicklung, founded by the North Rhine-Westphalia government. 2.The production of information media for public use, one of them chosen for public presentation on the Media-Festival Bilder aus der Physik 2001 in Göttingen. 3.A large-scale empirical evaluation in physics courses of class level 10 and 11 with 149 participating physic students. 4.The implementation of component-oriented learning software and dUML in technical education courses of class level 10 and 11. 5.A description of a possible concept implementation in economic or social science courses