LIVING MACHINERY
Advantages of Webble Technologies for Teaching and Learning
Jun Fujima, Anja Hawlitschek and Imke Hoppe
Fraunhofer IDMT, Children’s Media Dept., Erfurt, Germany
Keywords:
Interactive laboratories, Meme media, Webble technology, Collaborative learning, Evaluation.
Abstract:
Webble technology is the most recent form of Meme Media following Richard Dawkins’ seminal ideas about
memetics and relying on Yuzuru Tanaka’s interpretation of the Meme concept in the form of IntelligentPad.
The reach of Webble technologies is demonstrated by means of a particular Web-based interactive laboratory.
It arises the question how this novel technology is perceived and what impact it has on teaching and learn-
ing. This paper describes how to apply different learning methods to use the Webble technology for varying
learning goals.
1 INTRODUCTION
As Johann Nepomuk Nestroy said, the progress has
the peculiarity to look much bigger than it really is.
One should have these words in mind when praising
the advantages of technology for purposes of teaching
and learning.
The authors facing a rather appealing technology
are trying to find out the proper advantages which
may be drawn from this technology when invoked for
teaching and learning purposes. Emphasis is narrow-
mindedly put on those details which properly distin-
guish the new technology from others currently in
use. Do teachers really identify the added value of
the new possibilities? Do learners perceive and ap-
preciate the differences? To answer those questions,
the authors have to briefly introduce the essentials of
the technology first.
Webble technology is the most recent form of
Meme Media systems following Richard Dawkins’
“Meme” ideas (Dawkins, 1976) and relying on
Yuzuru Tanaka’s interpretation of the Meme concept
in the form of IntelligentPad (Tanaka, 2003). It pro-
vides wide opportunities for people to reuse, to re-
edit, and to redistribute software components pub-
lished on the Web. The authors have developed a
Web-based interactive laboratory based on the Web-
ble technology to provide widely reusable learning or
teaching environments. To build a prototype the au-
thors used solar technology as general learning topic
and therefore as concrete technical object a solar
“biker”, which is a model of a bicycle powered by
a solar cell.
On the one hand solar technology is a prominent
topic in the societal discourse because it is seen as a
promising alternative to nuclear power. On the other
hand solar technology provides an excellent opportu-
nity for interdisciplinary learning in school education
as it is an objective which can be analyzed through
the perspective of chemistry, physics, mechanics. As
known from a huge amount of empirical studies the
progress in using digital technology in school is rarely
cutting-edge (Windschitl and Sahl, 2002). Any soft-
ware for school contexts has to take the computer lit-
eracy of students as well as their teachers into account
and hence provide a multifunctional, easy to use sys-
tem which allows an entertaining experience at one
time (Zhao and Frank, 2003).
The metaphor “Living Machinery” points out that
a virtual laboratory should not be sterile and static but
a dynamic and vivid place to meet, to experiment and
to communicate. In a biological sense these machines
in the laboratory can grow through the user’s inter-
action and became hereby “Living Machinery”. In a
technical sense these machines are extensible and re-
ducible and therefore non-static but in a way “alive”.
2 MEME MEDIA TECHNOLOGY
Meme Media technology is a software technology
developed by Yuzuru Tanaka (Tanaka, 2003). The
Meme Media technology accelerates the reuse and the
215
Fujima J., Hawlitschek A. and Hoppe I. (2010).
LIVING MACHINERY - Advantages of Webble Technologies for Teaching and Learning.
In Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Computer Supported Education, pages 215-220
DOI: 10.5220/0002779502150220
Copyright
c
SciTePress
redistribution of the knowledge resources on comput-
ers like documents or application tools.
2.1 Meme Media Architecture
In order to realise Meme Media on computer systems,
we need to have a system which supports the rep-
resentation of various kinds of computing resources
such as texts, images, documents, and tools. Those
media should provide the functionality to recombine,
decompose, and duplicate resources by their users.
Meme Media architecture proposed by Tanaka is
based on object-oriented component architecture and
wrapper architecture. In the Meme Media system,
any type of knowledge resources is wrapped as a
graphic object. All media objects provide standard
user-interfaces and operations such as moving, re-
sizing, and copying. Through these standard opera-
tions, users may define child-parent relationships be-
tween objects to set up both graphical dependencies
and functional linkages. Composite media objects are
always decomposable and re-editable by users.
Each media object provides a list of interfaces
which maintains its state of the data, called slots.
From the users’ point of view, a slot works as a con-
nection jack of a media object just like AV-system
components. Users can functionally connect each
child object to one of the slots of its parent object.
Only a single connection can be defined between
child and parent objects. Connected objects form a
tree structure (Figure 1).
P
1
P
2
P
3
slot
Slot connection
P
1
P
2
P
3
slot
Slot connection
(b) Slot connection structure(a) User interface
P
2
P
3
P
1
P
3
Pasting &
Connecting
P
2
P
3
P
3
P
1
P
3
P
3
Pasting &
Connecting
Figure 1: A composite media object and its structure in In-
telligentPad.
Each media object has its Model-View-Control
architecture, and communicates with other objects
through standard messages; “set”, “gimme”, and “up-
date”. A “set” message and a “gimme” message are
used to access a single slot of its parent object, and
a update” message is used to propagate changes of
state to a child object. In their default definitions, a
“set” message sends its parameter value to its recip-
ient slot, while a “gimme” message requests a value
from its recipient slot.
2.2 Webble Technology
The most recent version of IntelligentPad is extended
as a Web-top system called Webble (Kuwahara and
Tanaka, 2009), which allows us to directly publish
and combine media objects in the Web. The Web-
ble means Web Pebbles, where “Pebble” is short for
“Pad Enhanced Building Block Lifelike Entity”. In
the Webble system, each media object has 2D vector
graphics and its view is called “webble”. Each webble
can be embedded into a local coordinate system of an-
other webble to define a child-parent relationship be-
tween them. It is possible to create Web-based com-
pound documents including dynamic graphic compo-
nents represented as composite webbles. Because the
Webble system is implemented by using Microsoft
Silverlight, it is available in major Web browsers only
by installing the Silverlight plugin. The Webble sys-
tem brings in more flexible representations of media
objects and more seamless integration with the cur-
rent Web technologies. Our Solar Biker Laboratory
uses the Webble system as the basic technology.
3 SOLAR BIKER CASE STUDY
The Solar Biker project has been inspired by some
real toy kits originally developed for educational pur-
poses by Peter Thron et al. in Ilmenau, Germany. The
general intention of the authors is to digitalise a series
of similar toy kits and produce Web-based laborato-
ries providing useful content for learning at school.
The teacher composes a target application like a com-
plex machine from the atomic components in the lab.
To rebuild it on their own requires knowing and ap-
plying the laws of physics, mechanics and electricity.
The Solar Biker Laboratory is a prototypicalexample.
Because the virtual laboratory is based on the Web-
ble technology, it allows the easy distribution and the
reuse of both components and composite results.
The system should also encourage users who
are intrinsically motivated and knowledge seeking to
learn something about certain topics, e.g. like visitors
of a museum. Solar technology is a highly discussed
topic in the public. People in western cultures are
very aware of energy-related topics, e.g. in Europe as
you can see in the results of the Eurobarometer (TNS
Opinion & Social, 2009). Therefore it is assumed that
people are interested to deal with environmental top-
ics like solar technology and that they are moreover
intrinsically motivated to deal with solar technology.
But there is a big gap between environmental
awareness and the understanding of basic phenomena
like solar technologies or climate change. Bell (1994)
CSEDU 2010 - 2nd International Conference on Computer Supported Education
216
and Peters and Heinrichs (2008) stated people of-
ten do not understand the underlying scientific coher-
ences. We will offer with our “Living Machinery
an approach to deal with relevant social and science
based topics in an playful but knowledge based man-
ner.
3.1 System Overview
The interface of the Web-based virtual laboratory
basically consists of four main parts: repository,
workspace, help desk, and administration panel. Fig-
ure 2 shows a snapshot of the current user interface
of the Solar Biker Laboratory. The repository lists up
available components as icons. Users can instantiate
a component by dragging out an icon from the reposi-
tory and drop it onto the workspace. In the workspace,
users can perform standard webble operations such as
moving and pasting to compose a solar biker. The
help desk displays basic information such as a de-
scription about the functionality of each component is
displayed. Here, learners can put in some keywords
in the input field on the help desk to retrieve appropri-
ate help documents. The administration panel can be
used for loading and saving composite components.
Workspace Repository
Help desk
Administrative panel
Figure 2: A basic layout of our virtual laboratory Web site.
Learners have to pick out the necessary compo-
nents from the repository and combine them correctly
in order to compose a solar biker. If this is success-
ful, learners can complete to build a leg animation
for bike riding. Through this system, users can study,
for example, how to supply electric power to a motor
through a solar cell or how to construct a leg move-
ment by combining some basic components.
3.2 Components
In order to realise the construction kit for a solar biker,
we implemented the necessary component parts as
webbles. The component set includes all necessary
components which form the body of a solar biker such
as a body frame, arms, and legs; and mechanical parts
like motors, gears, and solar cells. Some components
represent some sort of environmental conditions such
as a sun and clouds.
Each webble publishes the necessary information
as slots. They include some values used for customis-
ing the behavior of a webble and visual attributes such
as the position of a webble. By transferring these
slot values among composite webbles, various behav-
iors of a solar biker including movement of the legs
are realised. For example, a motor webble has the
slot “powerInput” for receiving electric power and the
slot “rotateAngle” for sending the rotation angle of its
shaft to other webbles.
Motor
SolarCell
Gear
#rotateAngle #powerInput
#angle
#power
#lightInput
Sun
#intensity
#light
Cloud
#light
#lightOutput
#position
Environment
(a) Display (b) Composition structure
Figure 3: An example composition of components.
Figure 3 shows an example composite webble
forming a part of a solar biker. From the users’ point
of view, the composite webble is displayed like Figure
3 (a). On the other hand, internally the composition
structure can be represented as Figure 3 (b). Here,
rectangles represent webbles and double circles rep-
resent slots. Additionally, solid arrows show slot con-
nections and their directions of data flow. Dashed ar-
rows indicate data transfer without slot connections.
In Figure 3, a gear webble and a solar cell webble
are combined as a motor webble, and the motor web-
ble is pasted on an environment webble as its child.
A sun webble and a cloud webble are also connected
to the environment webble. The solar cell receives
light through the environmental webble, and supplies
electric power to the motor webble. When the motor
receives electric power, it rotates the gear by trans-
ferring rotation angle. The learner’s movement of the
cloud webble horizontally changes the value of the
intensity slot because the cloud’s horizontal position
slot is connected with the intensity slot. Therefore,
the intensity of the light, which is supplied to the so-
lar cell, is changed, and the motor’s rotation speed is
also changed.
LIVING MACHINERY - Advantages of Webble Technologies for Teaching and Learning
217
Thus, learners can combine the available compo-
nents through direct manipulation of webbles to com-
pose toys. Through the construction process, learn-
ers can acquire which component should be combined
and how components interact with each other.
3.3 Help System
Even the most recent and advanced help systems
(Salazar and Macias, 2009) tend to be implemented as
a static document which includes some texts, images,
sounds, or videos. Learners can only read, watch, and
listen to them. The current compound document tech-
nologies such as HTML and Flash provide many op-
portunities to implement interactive documents which
include directly manipulable objects. However, it is
difficult to extract parts of such objects and reuse them
in the users’ environment for other purposes.
copying
pasting
Learner environment
Help document
Figure 4: Copying a component in a help document and
pasting it onto the workspace.
By using the Webble technology it is possible to
advance existing help systems. Figure 4 shows an ex-
ample of such a help system. Referring to the figure,
a learner opens a help page that explains how clouds
have an effect on the sun and how clouds should be
connected to an environment webble. The Webble
technology allows us to embed “Living Machinery”
on such documents as well. Teachers or system ad-
ministrators can create such documents just by com-
bining working webbles with some text webbles or
image webbles, and can store them in the system.
The help document in Figure 4 includes some text
descriptions, a working composite webble, and a fig-
ure showing the composition structure. The learner
may get some information from the text and the fig-
ure. However, for a learner who cannot understand
the text description well, the embedded working web-
ble might become a good alternative. Learners can
not only manipulate the embedded webble directly by
using the help document but can also make a copy of
the cloud, and paste it on the environment webble in
his workspace to confirm the function of the cloud.
4 PEDAGOGICAL AND
DIDACTICAL ADVANTAGES
The Webble system could be used to create different
learning scenarios. There is no need for much tech-
nical competence, so also teachers who have no ad-
vanced computer programming skills could easily ap-
propriate it. The great advantages in comparison to
other existing e-learning platforms are
first of all the ease of use
second, the flexibility of learning methods.
In the following chapter we will discuss these advan-
tages with regard to the virtual environment labora-
tory described earlier.
4.1 Ease of Use
Technology in school needs to be easy to use, espe-
cially for teachers (Buzhardt and Heitzman-Powell,
2005) but also for learners. Hereby the Webble tech-
nology provides within the virtual laboratory a tool-
box for teachers, through which different topics and
tasks can be edited as learning scenario and on the
other side a construction kit for learners to explore
the given tasks or learning environments.
Ease of use, as the extent to which a novice user
or a novice learner can manage an e-learning system
with a rather low amount of practice and training and
as the extend to which a more skilled user can manage
the e-learning system with a minimum of effort, is
one of the most influencing factors for the consumer
acceptance (Leong, 2003).
The teachers can use the webble technology to
create e-learning scenarios in the same way a child
would use building blocks to create certain physical
objects like Lego. The functionality of the webbles
enables their usage without any programming skills.
Every webble can work on its own or as a part of a
complex system. For example the options of a gear
webble (on its own) are restricted but due to the fact
that this component stores all the information about
its possible course of actions it can be easily put on
another webble and work together without further ef-
fort. Therefore the teacher can for example merely ar-
range the required webbles for a given task even with-
out programming them or programming them with a
simple relation setting through the user interface (like
a child-parent relation).
The e-learning system has to deal as mentioned
above with both more skilled users and novice users.
A novice user could be very pleased with a restricted
user prompting through a help system. A skilled user
on the other side could pretty soon be tired or bored
CSEDU 2010 - 2nd International Conference on Computer Supported Education
218
with that restricted user prompting. The help system
can control which elements are put together in which
order, so a failure analysis can take place. The user
will get a very individual feedback concerning con-
crete failures during a task and will receive the re-
quired assistance to solve the task.
4.2 The Flexibility Concerning
Didactical Methods of Learning
Overall the advantages for using the Webble sys-
tem are based on the flexibility concerning didactical
methods of learning. For the teacher it is very easy
to implement an optional instructional method to sup-
port the intended learning outcome. In the following
chapters three different types of learning approaches
and their possible implementation in the Webble sys-
tem will be described.
4.2.1 Discovery Learning
It was Piaget who argued that people construct new
knowledge through processes of accommodation and
assimilation on the basis of their experiences (Piaget,
2003). As one result the learning theory of construc-
tivism emerged. This approach of discovery learning
focuses on the learner as an active individual which
should be engaged in knowledge acquisition. Learn-
ing is seen as constructive process on the basis of ex-
periences (Loyens and Gijbels, 2008).
There are different instructional methods to foster
this kind of learning. The concept of discovery learn-
ing for example assumes the necessity of active ex-
amination and self-determinant exploration of objects
of the social and objective environment to foster sus-
tainable learning. Discovery learning has the poten-
tial to motivate students intrinsically, because of the
focus on self-determination (Deci and Ryan, 1985).
Exploration is one of the learning styles, which are
inherent from birth. The teacher has to offer space
for self-acting engagement with different objects and
topics (Bruner, 1961), which will be given through
the Webble technology. Hence important properties
of the virtual environmental lab are the possibility to
freely discover the learning environment and possible
actions within it. It is possible to change or recreate
objects consisting of different webbles through a pro-
cess of trial and error. Learning through experiences
is also enhanced through the cooperation with other
students. Therefore the Webble system provides the
possibility to exchange results as webbles via Internet
with other users.
4.2.2 Playful Learning
Learning through playing is another learning style, in-
herent from birth. Great advantages of playful learn-
ing are also seen in the potential for intrinsic motiva-
tion. Playing is an action that takes place for its own
sake. A player experiences playing as a rewarding
activity that includes feelings like enjoyment or sus-
pense (Huizinga, 2006). Playing is mostly attended
by deep concentration on the content and the vol-
untary investment of time. These are characteristics
each teacher would decide as being very important for
learning.
There are different options for students using the
virtual laboratory as a playful learning platform. First
of all it providesthe possibility of just playing around.
Therefore the solar biker provides a multifunctional
virtual playground. Students can stick different com-
ponents together, either to explore the manifold pos-
sibilities or to reach certain internal goals. Learn-
ing based on playing without certain goals gives the
learner a wide range of possible actions to discover,
practice and experience (Mitgutsch, 2008).
Students without intrinsic motivation would
maybe soon loose the desire to play. In this case it
could be a promising alternative to bring in the di-
mension of competition. Within the Webble system
it is easily possible to change the players experience
completely and put in the aspect of competition and
strict rules. For example there can be a tournament
between different groups of students to reach a given
goal first or the teacher can apply a high score for the
optimal implementation of given machines in a given
environment – digital game-based learning (Prensky,
2001).
4.2.3 Guided Learning
There is also a main research area dealing with dis-
covery learning, which mainly shows that in some
cases guided learning is more effective for learners
(Kirschner et al., 2006). That’s why an e-learning en-
vironment should be capable to react on difficulties
of the learner and offer the chance for the teacher to
implement guided learning strategies. The first point
is linked with the help function. The importance of
the help function’s usability and the implementation
in the Webble system is described above.
The second point refers to strategies of direct in-
structional guidance. This means that teachers pro-
vide every topic-relevant information for learners and
support a learning strategy. To add a focused learning
goal, working examples and steps to reach the learn-
ing goal can be very fruitful for novice learners, which
otherwise would be confused or lost because of the
LIVING MACHINERY - Advantages of Webble Technologies for Teaching and Learning
219
manifold possibilities of the virtual laboratory envi-
ronment.
5 CONCLUSIONS
Inspired and driven by the idea of Memes and based
on former work about IntelligentPad and the Webble
technology, the authors developed a prototype of a
virtual and interactive laboratory, namely the “solar
biker”. The virtual solar biker supports learning as
well as teaching, because the underlying Web appli-
cation monitors the learning progress of the user and
provides individual help. Furthermore the solar biker
can be used for collaborative work, for example the
user can send the work results as “living machines”
via e-mail to others. We outlined three different di-
dactic methods to illustrate how the solar biker can be
flexibly embedded in different learning situations de-
pending on previous knowledge, motivation, or learn-
ing goals.
We regard the empirical evaluation as the main
next step. The empirical evaluation will be conducted
as formative evaluation, integrating the perspective of
students as well as teachers. The “Living Machinery”
follows the meme media philosophy and supports a
creative way to produce, reuse, and reedit knowledge
in a social and communicative manner. The leading
research question for the empirical evaluation is: do
the two target groups appreciate the new character of
that “Living Machinery”?
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The present research and development has been par-
tially supported by the Thuringian Ministry for Cul-
ture (TKM) within the project iCycle under contract
PE-004-2-1.
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