CUSTOMIZING HANDHELD SIMULATION SCENARIOS WITH A HANDHELD AUTHORINGTOOL
Author(s):
Maria José Marcelino,
Carlos Brigas
Paper abstract: Recently we have been assisting to an increase in the use of handheld software in education. Yet, in what
concerns modeling and simulation, what we find most are closed packages, representing a specific
situation, that once used become exhausted. We need tools that allow representing more situations easily
and quickly. This motivated the development of Sim-H, an authoring system for handheld modeling and
simulation that uses essentially direct manipulation techniques, various representation and interaction
forms to create and test models and simulations. At the moment it is made by three editors, one for
model building, or a modeling tool, another to create scenarios for models that are easier to interact with
than the models themselves, and a third one to include support to learning in a model or a scenario,
namely extra information and guidance, that is to build simulations. Due to Sim-H architecture it is very
easy to aggregate to a single model several scenarios or learning layers. In the scope of this paper we will
focus mainly on the scenario editor, its characteristics and the kind of products it allows to build.
