ABSTRACT

In this chapter, the authors present some of current analyses and ideas about the teaching process. They briefly review the people analyses of the teaching strategies they have observed in dialogues and the goal structure necessary to support them. The authors discuss some of the issues that they see as important in understanding where bugs really come from and what is necessary to characterize adequately the knowledge a student must acquire to understand a complex system. Learning how to use different models and to map between them may, in fact, be one of the most important aspects of understanding complex systems. The simulation models and the functional models give different perspectives on the evaporation process, but it is important to be able to map between the two kinds of models. The emphasis should be on the kinds of situations and problems for which each model is applicable, and on how to apply them to solve different types of novel problems.