In our view, technical fluency involves not only knowing how to use technical tools, but also knowing how to construct things of significance with those tools. Technological fluency involves the ability to express, explore, and realize ideas with new technological media-and to take advantage of those media to enhance learning in other domains. To serve these needs, we will develop initial versions of a constructopedia-a new kind of knowledge source in which concepts are indexed according to their uses in construction. The constructopedia is a browsable, interactive database, designed to help students build new constructions-and to help them make connections to mathematical and scientific ideas underlying those constructions. Representations of knowledge.
New media call out for new representations.
The language and forms most appropriate for representing phenomenon in one medium might be quite inappropriate in another. We aim to develop new representations of scientific and mathematical knowledge that are more intuitive and concrete for students, and better suited to the nature of computational media. We intend to collaborate closing with user of our materials, using new information channels to accelerate and enhance the development cycle for the materials, using new information channels to accelerate and enhance the development cycle for the materials, making the development process more rapid, open, and transparent. We also plan to use new information channels to make the evaluation cycle shorter and richer.