Software environments for computer aided education

Abstract

In the first part, we describe an example of an hypermedia tool for education, the Arcade laboratory. It illustrates our ideas about how to offer complementary resources to both teacher and student.In the second part, we analyze two kinds of production environment. The first one (Smalltalk) is based on the object-oriented approach: it reduces production work by making it easy to reuse predefined components, but it requires a good programming ability. The second one uses hypermedia software (HyperCard, ToolBook): it lets users produce small applications, even with a very minimal programming ability.In the last part, we describe our approach to improve both kinds of environment. Our final objective is to provide teachers with simple tools to adapt existing applications, or even to create new ones, so that they may easily integrate computer aided education in their daily practices.