The unless switch: adding conditional logic to concept mapping for middle school students

Qualitative concept maps are useful for sharing the structure of a domain and for assessing students' understanding. While concept maps made from links and nodes depict static causal relationships between concepts quite well, they provide little support for displaying conditional logic and thresholds for causation. In this paper, we describe the process of incorporating a representation for conditional reasoning into Betty, a computer agent students teach via concept maps. Betty helps students formalize their knowledge of a domain by acting as a novice learner. Students use Betty to construct and assess their knowledge of science topics.We tested several prototypes combining conditional logic with concept maps and found that people had difficulty keeping conditional states and conceptual nodes separate. In the end, the "Unless Switch" provided the closest semantic parallel to the type of reasoning we wanted students to learn and generated the least amount of confusion.