Experiments In Learning Chemical Engineering Modeling Skills

Creating educational software forces a difficult tradeoff. The software must be easy for the students to use, but the tasks from which the students will learn the concepts must not be automated. DEVICE (Dynamic Environment for Visualization of Chemical Engineering) is a learning environment aimed at allowing chemical engineering students to model chemical engineering problems, then execute those problems as simulations. In the design of DEVICE, we have attempted to use student tasks to focus attention on the most important parts of the problem without overwhelming students with extraneous detail.