Investigate and decide learning environments: Specializing task models for authoring tool design

The complexities of building educational software can be reduced by relying on appropriate tools for adapting and re-using similar, previous applications. Although researchers have been creating tools for automating some aspects of software design, most of these tools typically aim for generality, attempting to cover a broad class of interactive programs in many domains. However, this approach may not be effective for building complex interactive systems, and fails to re-apply the instruction and design expertise implicit within prior software applications. An alternative is to provide tools which use specialized, rather than general, task models, tailored specifically to a target category of software. In addition, an understanding of the authoring task itself can inform the design of such specialized authoring environments. This article presents a prototype authoring tool for interactive educational software, called IDLE-Tool. Investigate and Decide Learning Environments (IDLE) is introduced as the task model around which the tool is based, and a model of the authoring process, called Guided Case Adaptation, is offered as an approach to employing the model and an exemplar in tandem to effectively support the design process.