MANOLIS KOUTLIS and THANASIS HADZILACOS
Computer Technology Institute and
Department of Computer Engineering and Informatics
University of Patras, Greece
The reported work was motivated from the identification of the need for effective tools to support the "systematic production" of state-of-the-art Geography courseware and what's more, tools that can be creatively used by the programming-illiterate audience of students and teachers. The developed Microworlds should address important issues of spatio-temporal and geographical reasoning such as geographic-scale, navigation, map manipulation and multiple representation of the relative concepts, as well as pedagogical requirements such as exploratory learning, and collaborative, project-based work.
We adopt a "component-oriented" approach: the end-user is provided with a "kit" of high-level, geography-specific reusable software components each with predefined behavior (active-maps, a globe, multimedia books, clocks, compasses, calculators, etc) together with a mechanism that allows the assembly of any number of them into functional Microworlds.
Today "Avakeeo" providing a small number of prefabricated components and a visual Microworld editor, can be effectively utilized to create simple (but interesting) scenarios around the concept of "travel, explore and discover": children manipulate "rabbits" that travel on maps under strict spatial commanding and are able to report the map-features of their position, which in turn can be fed to other components for further analysis (see "http://www.cti.gr/RD3/mws.html" for a couple of examples).
In its final version Avakeeo will provide most of the functionality typically found in a GIS through tight cooperation of map and data-base components. However, it should not be viewed just as a GIS for children, but rather as a learning environment for the study of Geography in its broad sense. Teachers and/or students can very easily setup new experiment scenarios or alter existing ones, according to their own pedagogical practices, by interactively manipulating the component's interconnections. Finally, Avakeeo's architecture allows the construction of cross-subject scenarios through suitable subject-specific components: geography based geometry (Logo-geometry components have already been developed), mathematics and history are examples of what could follow.
See http://www.cti.gr/RD3/avax.html for more information about this project.