Towards Design Learning Environments - I: Exploring How Devices Work

Knowledge-based support for learning about physical devices is a classical problem in research on intelligent tutoring systems (ITS). The large amount of knowledge engineering needed, however, presents a major difficulty in constructing ITS's for learning how devices work. Many knowledge-based design systems, on the other hand, already contain libraries of device designs and models. This provides an opportunity for reusing the legacy device libraries for supporting the learning of how devices work. We report on an experiment on the computational feasibility of this reuse of device libraries. In particular, we describe how the structure-behavior-function (SBF) device models in an autonomous knowledge-based design system called KRITIK enable device explanation and exploration in an interactive design and learning environment called Interactive Kritik.