Designing CIspace: Pedagogy and Usability in a Learning Environment for AI
- Saleema Amershi ,
- N. Arksey ,
- G. Carenini ,
- C. Conati ,
- A. Mackworth ,
- H. Maclaren ,
- D. Poole
In Proceedings of the ACM/SIGCSE Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education ITiCSE '05 |
Published by ACM
This paper describes the design of the CIspace interactive visualization tools for teaching and learning Artificial Intelligence. Our approach to design is to iterate through three phases: identifying pedagogical and usability goals for supporting both educators and students, designing to achieve these goals, and then evaluating our system. We believe identifying these goals is essential in confronting the usability deficiencies and mixed results about the pedagogical effectiveness of interactive visualizations reported in the Education literature. The CIspace tools have been used and positively received in undergraduate and graduate classrooms at the University of British Columbia and internationally. We hope that our experiences can inform other developers of interactive visualizations and encourage their use in classrooms and other learning environments.