Educator's Use of Concurrency When Describing Educational Simulations

In this article, we report on an investigation into how educators describe the design of three software systems. We have been especially interested in how they describe events that are concurrent, as we believe support for concurrency will be required of an educational software authoring system. Their descriptions of concurrent processes can then be used to design the authoring system to “naturally” support concurrent programming. Almost all participants in our investigation used concurrency as a part of their description. No one seemed to think that this was difficult. In addition, we observed that the educators frequently thought in terms of objects. These results suggest that any authoring environment targeted at teaching should include support for concurrency and objects.

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