Balancing usability and learning in an interface

Creating educational software forces a difficult tradeoff. The software must be easy for the students to use, yet not so simple that the parts that students are to learn from are done for them by the computer. DEVICE (Dynamic Environment for Visualization of Chemical Engineering) is a learning environment aimed at allowing chemical engineering students to model chemical engineering problems, then execute those problems as simulations. In the design of DEVICE, we have attempted to use student tasks to focus attention on the most important parts of the problem without overwhelming students with extnneous detail.