(PN) Petri nets and school/children?
Dear All,
I was about to suggest Petri nets as a (to me obvious) vehicle for
conveying computer science concepts (*) to someone working on
learning support environments for children. Since they place a high
value on useability studies, I wanted to check first on the state of the
art wrt to children learning and using Petri nets in general.
To my utter surprise, I can’t seem to find any references on this. The
most likely search terms lead to a flood of irrelevant results (Petri
net [schools/education/learning/children/..]), due to the overloaded
terms, which might hide the relevant ones. There are hints that German
schools might teach “automata and Petri nets” as part of general
informatics in some school forms, but no details, let alone useability
studies.
Could anyone please point me to relevant references, or has this
combination really not been explored? If the subject is well-researched,
please reply offlist, and I’ll summarize the references I get, but if not, I
would appreciate some on-list discussion on the absence of obvious
references (no obvious keywords in the bibliography, either).
Are Petri nets not as suited for this area as I thought? Have there
been negative results? Or just noone looking, and those working
with children and Petri nets not writing about it? Anyone willing
to share personal experiences/experimental results?
Claus
(*) in the absence of general studies, a particular area of interest
would be the modeling of player and non-player character behaviour
and interaction in multi-player games (popular in edutainment). I
found a few references on dialogue and plot modelling, but not
much (in spite of the wealth of agent/robot task and interaction
planning work), and again nothing targetted at school-age children.
PS. Searching the mailing list archives is slightly impeded by all
those conference announcements matching so many keywords.
Is there a way to tag and filter them, to indicate whether one is
looking for announcements or discussion posts?
—-
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