This well-written paper explores how well school teachers adapt to designing and implementing computer-based materials when example conceptual designs can be converted to ones based on similar underlying abstractions (called “reuse” here). The development environment used is Visual AgenTalk (VAT).

The experimenters presented example-based materials to five middle and high school teachers, who then attempted to solve new problems by transferring concepts to similar objects. Specifically, an example agent-based, visual water cycle simulation served as an example for building a food chain simulation, as well as other potential reuse scenarios. The teachers were encouraged to vocalize their thoughts as they implemented solutions, thereby providing insights into their approaches.

Results of the experiments indicate that the reuse methodology is successful, although features of VAT sometimes misled the teachers. Some other misconceptions were more fundamental (for example, confusing actions that change an agent’s appearance, and actions that transform an agent into another agent). The teachers performed very well in a second experiment, so the learning curve was not extended. Overall, the teachers were willing to reuse example code, rather than start from scratch.

This paper clearly describes the research and its conclusions. It is recommended to those interested in reuse in visual simulation programming, especially in educational settings.