Considering a full range of teaching techniques for use in interactive educational software: a practical guide and brainstorming session

The paper addresses a moment in the design of educational software that is crucial and yet often unrecognized and unexploited: the moment when the designers decide what traditional teaching techniques (and related pedagogies) will be used. In our experience, this decision is often reached without due consideration of the alternatives, with the result that many educational modules tend to approach their subject matter in the same few ways, e.g., an interactive visualization of an algorithm or physical process. Our goal is not to recommend one teaching approach over another, but to reinforce awareness of the breadth of choice that is available. To that end, we have selected thirteen common teaching techniques that are particularly appropriate for interactive software and describe them in a traditional context and in terms of their potential online incarnations.