ABSTRACT
The author became more interested in the fourth quadrant during my tenure as dean of continuing education at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). The process of designing artifacts, presenting them to stakeholders and collaborators, and refining them based on feedback can be seen as a form of making sense of the world. There is a healthy respect for design in the learning sciences. For example, the design experiments championed by Brown and Collins led to further articulation of design-based research that many researchers use in their studies of learning interventions. As a graduate student, the author was part of a project named Biology Guided Inquiry Learning Environments (BGuILE), a suite of software and curricula for teaching and learning biology. After a review of the literature on biology education, the authors began developing the original version of Animal Landlord, a computer simulation of lion hunting that students could use to explore variables related to animal behavior.
