The CAPE environment consists of a primary canvas area, where modeling is performed, and a palette of modeling elements available in the particular modeling aspect. Courseware authors select and drag elements from the palette of modeling elements onto the canvas of a particular model. To the right hand side of the CAPE screen shot in Figure 1 is a browser pane with multiple folders. These folders contain resources that support the descriptive tasks performed in CAPE's three primary aspects. A fourth folder will provide Assessment-related resources in the future.
References act much like pointers in a traditional programming language.
The Repository folder contains sub-folders for content, atomic and aggregated, as well as for instructional design patterns, which are templates for instructional designs based on the work of the Learning Sciences Thrust. The Taxonomies folder contains graphical views of the taxonomies defined by each of the VaNTH Bioengineering Domains. Such taxonomies can be created using other tools and are persisted in a centralized relational database. CAPE has facilities for retrieving taxonomies from and updating this database. A brief description of these capabilities can be found here .