ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses an approach to science and engineering education that centers on introducing students to causal models of physical systems at an intermediate level of abstraction. When students first interact with computer microworlds that embody such models, they typically induce principles that are overly situation specific. Traditional approaches fail to convey to students an understanding of the form of scientific knowledge and the processes of scientific inquiry, although these are perhaps the most important aspects of knowing science in a scientifically literate society. In the progression of qualitative macroscopic models, students are first introduced to the basic concept of a circuit. Intermediate causal models portray key domain constructs in a readily understandable form. A crucial property is that they parse the behavior of a system into a sequence of discrete causal events that embody a simple mechanism.
