ABSTRACT
Collaborating with Jeremy Roschelle at SRI International, Kaput developed a simulation environment called SimCalc to help middle-school students understand change. The modules are implementations of the many ideas discussed in this book. The first discusses object manipulation and the second discusses simulation. Object manipulation is central to the Dimensional Thinking module but simulation is central to those modules that model dynamic events. The simulation of this problem is similar to the fish problem in SimCalc. SimCalc, the Animation Tutor, and ANIMATE can all provide such simulations when they are needed. The goal of his SimCalc project is to make algebra accessible to all students by dynamically linking animations with graphs of functions. A powerful feature of SimCalc is that it allows students to manipulate one representation to see how it influences representation.
