Instruction in most STEM domains uses visuals to illustrate complex problems. During problem solving, students often manipulate and construct visuals. Traditionally, students draw visuals on paper and receive delayed feedback from an instructor. Educational technologies have the advantage that they can provide immediate feedback on students’ visuals. This feedback allows students to learn visualization conventions and to learn new content knowledge. This paper presents a design-based research approach to develop visual tools for an educational technology for chemistry. In this research, three design tradeoffs emerged: (1) Which aspects of the drawing task should visual tools constrain? (2) How should visual tools account for variability in students’ prior experiences? (3) How should the design of multiple visual tools be aligned so that students can easily transition between them? Our design-based research approach comprises three studies that address each of these design challenges in the context of chemistry visualizations. Our studies yield principles for the design of interactive visual tools for educational technologies.

中文翻译：

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教育技术交互式可视化工具的设计折衷

大多数STEM领域的教学都使用视觉效果来说明复杂的问题。在解决问题期间，学生经常操纵和构建视觉效果。传统上，学生在纸上绘制视觉效果，并从教师那里收到延迟的反馈。教育技术的优势在于，它们可以提供有关学生视觉效果的即时反馈。该反馈使学生能够学习可视化惯例并学习新的内容知识。本文提出了一种基于设计的研究方法，以开发用于化学教育技术的视觉工具。在这项研究中，出现了三个设计权衡：（1）视觉工具应限制绘图任务的哪些方面？（2）视觉工具应如何解释学生先前经历的变化？（3）如何使多个视觉工具的设计保持一致，以使学生能够轻松地在它们之间进行转换？我们基于设计的研究方法包括三项研究，分别针对化学可视化方面的这些设计挑战。我们的研究提出了用于教育技术的交互式视觉工具设计的原则。