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Learning to create and use models of real-worldsituations is an important goal for under-graduate engineers. Engineers todayuse computer models to explore design problems and test solutions before actuallybuilding anything. Learning to create and use models of real-world sit-uationsis a challenging task. Most efforts to teach modeling are essentially a meansof teach-ing students programming, which is recognized as difficult. In theapproach described in this paper, we sought to simplify the task as much aspossible away from programming, while still requiring students tolearn to use the mathematical models necessary to understand a given sit-uation.We worked in the domain of Chemical Engineering with a tool called DEVICE(Dynamic Environment for Visualization in Chemical Engineering). What we foundthrough an iterative development effort is that emphasizing connections betweenthe real world and the mathematical model led to learning and transfer benefits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Programming is a complex cognitive task for students, because of thedifficulty of finding the appropriate elements (the “decomposition”problem) and integrating them correctly into a whole (the “composition”problem). Programming is also hard to learn, because so much of the thinkingbehind a program is implicit and the process of programming is long and complicated.Our approach is to integrate a computer-aided design tool (CAD) with scaffoldingto create a single, cohesive, and coherent workbench for the entire process.Our workbench is called the GPCeditor. We have evaluated its use by high-schoolstudents. Our results suggest that students program well in the GPCeditor,they learn good programming practices, and that the learning is occurringthrough use of the GPCeditor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]