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

 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).

slot

Slot connection

slot

Slot connection

(b) Slot connection structure(a) User interface

Pasting &

Connecting

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

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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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