Children develop ideas about natural phenomena before they are taught science in school. In some instance these ideas are in keeping with the science which is thaught. In many cases, however, there are significant deifferences children's notions and school science.

This book can be considered as a reference book for the studies in children's misconceptions. There are several fields that result important for our research: 1. living things; 2. nutrition; 3. growth; 4. responding to the environment; 5. ecosystems. in addition to those there is an interesting part in the abiotic components of the environment: 6. water; 7. air; 8. light; 9. heating. Humidity is not addressed directly by this research, although we could infer interesting ideas in the water section.

Keywords: Misconceptions, children's early ideas

NetLogo is the new cross-platform agent-based parallel modelling and simulation environment from CCL ( ). NetLogo is a programmable modelling environment for simulationg natural and social phenomena. It is particularly well suited for modelling complex systems developing over time. Modelers can give instructions to hundreds or thousand of independent ``agents'' all operating in parallel. This makes it possible to explore the connection between the micro-level behavior of individuals and the macro-level patterns that emerge from the interaction of many individuals.

Keywords: Simulation software, Decentralized mindset

This study is designed to understand how to facilitate children's conceptual growth about plants using digital technology. Fifteen 4 and 5 year old children were interviewedto identify their understanding about plant growth and reproduction. Misunderstandings include representations of origins of plants and relations between seeds and plants. A digital toy plant was then used to challengethese representations. Difficulties in understanding focused on transitions in growth, aspects of the digital display designm and whether to begin the plant or the seed.

Keywords: Children early ideas, Plant growth, Life Cycle, Toys

The Primary SPACE Project is a classroom-based research project which aims to establish the ideas which primary school children have in particular science concepts areas; the possibility of children modifying their ideas as the result of relevent experiences.

This is a large scale research project involving several school in UK. The researcher did some interviews at the beginning to assess children previous conceptions, then asked the teachers to follow a particular unit of teaching and then made a posttest to assess the impact of this activity on children's reasoning. The tools proposed to the students to explore growth were the ``classical'' ones. No technological support was offered. Their results are in accord with Gash [19].

Keywords: Classrom-based research project, Misconceptions

Inquiry learning is an educational method that has been recognised for its efficacy in rpomoting core intellectual values. Advantages in instructional technology expand the scope of subjects to which the method can be applied. However, psychological research on scientific thinking warns educators that adolescents often lack metacognitive attributes necessary for optimal inquiry learning. Adolescents frequentely exhibit faulty mental models of multivariable causality in which the effects of single variables are neither additive nor consistent. As a result, students perceive an arbitrary subset of casual variables as responsible for any outcome, and do not understand the need to control for the effects of other variables. Described here is a software-based intervantion designed to facilitate students' metalevel and performance-level inquiry skills by enhancing their understanding of multivariable causality.

The authors buit a computer prototype environment called ``simulation earthquake'', in which to experiment with multivariate causality. They found that student's beliefs are not strong because they thought of a variable as causal in one instance and non-causal in another instance depending on the situation so the variable's effect are not constant. They suggest that faulty mental models of multivarible causality may impede students' ability to conduct good scientific investigations and that improvements in these models leads to better scientific thinking skills.

Keywords: Inquiry learning, knowledge acquisition, scientific reasoning, metacognition, mental models, goal-based scenarios

Some literature reports how learners' alternative ideas in science may be coherent, stable, and theory like. However, other commentators suggest that the available data supports the view that children's thinking is inconsistent, with elicited notions being piecemeal, ad hoc, and deeply situated in specific contexts. This is considered to reflect the fragmentary and unscientific nature of the learner's knowledge. Accumulating evidence from in-depth work with individual learners is beginning to show that models of cognitive structure that can usefully inform teaching may need to be more complex than either of these views admit. Evidence from a case study is presented to show how a learner may simultanously hold several alternative explanatory schemes, each of which is persistent over time and applied coherently across a wide range of overlapping contexts. It is argued that the manifold nature of learners' conceptions may be a key to modelling conceptual development.

Altough some students seem to hold stable manifold conceptions in congitive structure, this does not implyh that all the contraddictory or incoherent explainations can be explained in terms of 'multiple frameworks'. Some of the observed situations may be 'ephemeral reflections' of the process of learners constructing ideas in situ. This ability, ideed, of constructing alternative understanding of a topic, without committing to them, could be a key aspect of conceptual change. In addittion to this first alternative to the manifold explaination there can be another possibility of considering these empirical 'glitch' as transitional states of belief in one's framework (this is in accord with Maloney and Siegler, 1993).

Keywords: Conceptual development

The ability to design uncounfounded experiments and make valid inferences from their outcomes is an essential skill in scientific reasoning. The present study addressed an important issue in scientific reasoning end cognitive development: how children acquire a domain-general processing strategy (Control of Variables Strategy or CVS) and generalize it across various contexts. Seven to 10-years-olds (N = 87) designed and evaluated experiments and made inferences from the experimental outcomes. When provided with explicit training within domain, combined with probe questions, children were able to learn and transfer the basic strategy fro designing uncounfounded experiments.

The authors were interested in understanding how the transfer of specific skills in the control of variables strategy can affect the learning process. Initially they discreiminate between Discovery learning and Formal learning. They believe that Discovery learning may be effective when problems outcomes provide informative feedback (Siegler, 1976). Therefore they envisioned the transfer of the above strategy as the result of explicit training (using examples and direct instraction to teach the general strategy) and implicit training via probes (providing systematic questions following children's activities). Their findings showed that with appropiate instruction, elementary schoolchildren are capable of understanding, learning, and transferring the basic strategy when designing and evaluationg simple tests. For them the analogical reasoning (analogical = ANALOGIES) plays a central role in the real world of scientific discovery. In the literature of analogical transfer and problem solving appears several major cognitive processes: 1. contruct a representation of the source problem; 2. when encoutering a similar problem, students need to access the relevant source information and notice the similarity shared by the problems; 3. the key components of the problems needs to be mapped, so that the source solutions or strategies can be extended; 4. the relevant solution needs to be implemented in the new context or domain. Finally the authors concluded that one critical factor facilitating schema construction is the opportunity to process diverse instances that share a similar goal structure or solution principle. In addition to this point, they report that when the task or problems generate outcomes that provide clear feedback, children are capable of modifying their initial mental modeland discovering a rule or principle.

Keywords: Control of Variable Strategy, Metal models

Students have difficulty understanding ecosystem concepts. This article argues that the difficulty stems partly from not grasping the underlying causality that structures the concepts. We report on an intervention study designed to teach third graders to reason about domino, cyclic, and mutual causality by infusing causally-focused activities and explicit discussion about the nature of each type of causality into a teacher-taught unit on ecosystems. Three conditions were contrasted: 1. activities with discussion; 2 activities only; 3. no infused activities. Students who participated in bothe the activities, designed to reveal the underlying causal structure and the discussion of the nature of causality, showed significantly deeper understanding of the connectedness within ecosystems and demontrated a significantly better grasp if the process of decomposition and the mechanism that cause it. The results suggest that it is important to teach students how to structure ecosystems concepts in addition to teaching ecosystem information.

The authors of this paper suggest that many misunderstanding in the field have at their core, a simplistic understanding of the nature of causality. Students have difficulties in reasoning about causality in a systematic senseas well as an inability to deal with the specific types of causal patterns embedded in ecosystems. They state that Students tend to think locally and miss the larger picture. this is in accord with Resnick [8]. Interesting findings are that often children seems to ignore indirect effect and considering the abiotic factors in the environment. Also student may think that a factor is necessary without considering that is not sufficient. In addition people often tend to ``overcorrect'' because the outcome they want is not immediate rather than waiting to let the system dynamics play out and acting on the overall process. Onother point of interest in their research is that they considered ``hidden causes'' as a factor in the learning process: there is no reason they would assume that there is a causal mechanism that they cannot see. We argue that an exploration process have to be placed in contrast with teaching activities.

Keywords: Ecosystems, Causality, Deep Understanding

BioBLAST (Better Learning Through Adventure, Simulation and Telecommunications) is a multimedia curriculum supplement for high school biology classes. Based on NASA's Advanced Life Support research, the program offers students both traditional and computer-based research tools to study the interdependent components of a bioregenerative life-support system (BLiSS) for long-term space habitation. Student tasks are presented as part of an adventure mission at a virtual lunar research station. The mission culminates with students testing their own BLiSS designs using the BaBS (Build a BLiSS System) simulator, an integrated modeling system.

BioBLAST is a simulation software that incorporates some collaborative features of interaction over the internet.

Keywords: Simulation software, Collaborative Learnign

The producers of SimLife refer to it as ``The Genetic Playground.'' The game allows users to explore the interaction life-forms and environments. Users can manipulate the genetics of both plants and animals to determine whether these new species could survive in the Earth's various environments. Players can also create new worlds with distinctive environments to see how certain species (earth's species or their own) fare within them.

SimLIFE is a very old game. I think was one of the precursor of the Sim like kind of games. It has some interesting features in the interface because it allows the player to chose which lifeform to import in the terraform environment and to cheat on the genetic code of such lifeform. It is a mere simulation in which users cannot access the underneath algorithm.

Keywords: Simulation software

The Garden with Insight garden simulator is an educational simulation that uses weather, soil, and plant growth models to simulate a simple garden in an open-ended microworld setting. You can plant vegetables and grow them to learn more about plants, the soil, the weather, gardening, and science.

As for the SimLIFE environment, this software package is a mere simulation. It is not possible to access the model underneath. It present some nice features of the graphical interface because users can play around with garden tools keeping care of the plant. The algorithm seems to be very accurate altough we couldn't find any documents that describe the theoretical framework in which it ahs been developed.

Keywords: Simulation software

Nerve Garden is a biologically-inspired multi-user collaborative 3D virtual world available to a wide Internet audience. The project combines a number of methods and technologies, including L-systems, Java, cellular automata, and VRML. Nerve Garden is a work in progress designed to provide a compelling experience of a virtual terrarium which exhibits properties of growth, decay and energy transfer reminiscent of a simple ecosystem. The goals of the Nerve Garden project are to create an on-line ``collaborative A-Life laboratory'' which can be extended by a large number of users for purposes of education and research.

Nerve Garden is a collaborative environment in which the user can design his/her own plant and can test this design on an island in which the plant can grow. Other users over the internet will use the same island to ``plant'' other plants. This is considered a collaborative experimental environment.

Keywords: Simulation software, Collaborative Learning

The telegarden installation allows WWW users to view and interact with a remote garden filled with living plants. Members can plant, water, and monitor the progress of seedlings via the tender movements of an industrial robot arm. Internet behavior might be characterized as ``hunting and gathering''; our purpose is to consider the ``post-nomadic'' community, where survival favors those who work together.

This was a physical installation in California in which a robotic gardener keeps care of potted plants accordingly with users commands over the Internet. This design present some interesting features like the usage of real plants, altough the user can access them only virtually.

Keywords: Collaborative Learning, Telerobotic control

Does our perception of when an event occurs depend on whether we caused it? A recent study suggests that when we perceive our actions to cause an event, it seems to occur earlier than if we did not cause it.

This study highlight the fact that events that are close togheter in space and time are more likely than spatiotemporally dinstant events to be perceived as casually related. Therefore, children like adults use spatiotemporal relationship to infer causal relation between objects. Our design solution try to push toghether events and time trying to create more proximity to highlight any eventual relation between varibles.

Keywords: Time perception

[...] The shift from naive to expert is a shift from one system of belief about the physical world to another, one set of concepts to another one set of problems solving capabilities to another. [...] On the whole, work on the naive-expert shift has bee charaterized by two complimentary approaches, both focusing on the problem solving. First, the errors of novices while solving problems are diagnosed to reveal systematic misconceptions. In the second approach, the emphasis is on the information processing analyses of problem-solving procedures themselves, and how expert and novices differ in this regard. [...] In this chapter we present part of an historical case study. We describe the theory change at all three levels-domain, model and individual concepts, and analyze the relations among these three levels of description. [...] How can two concepts as different as heat and temperature not be distinguished?

Temperature is an intensive variable whereas heat is an extensive one. In the past the Experimenters made the same mistake children do nowadays. For them heat and temperature were not differentiate.

In order to name and classify a plant they see, children use their existing mental models to provide the plant with a name and classification. In this study pupils of a range of ages (5, 8, 10, 14 years old) were presented with preserved specimens of six different plants (strictly, five plants and a fungus) and asked a series of questions about them. Their responses indicate that pupils of all ages mainly recognise and use anatomical features when naming the plants and explaining why they are what they are. However, older pupils are more likely to also use habitat features.

This study concentrated on the way children classify plants. In this particular context the authors place mental models versus accepted knowledge. In their educational implications they found that 'plants readily engage pupil interest' but they can be helped to observe more carefully. In addition they think that documentation and indirect observation may be less important that the direct one.

Keywords: Biology education, Plants, Mental models, Classification, Informal learning

We are interested in the ways in which pupils conversations can be analysed when pupils are introduced to a novel phenomenon. In this study, bottled ecosystems containing live prine shrimps (Artemia salina) were presented to groups of Year 2 (6-7 year old) and Year 5 (9-10 year old) children as a science topic. A total of 250 children spontanous conversations were audio-recorded and subsequentely transcribed and analysed using three different approaches: systemic networks, context of meaning, and the approach of Cosgrove and Schaverien . [...] This paper explores the results obtained from using these three approaches and discusses the advantages and limitations of each.

This paper present thee different methods to analyse pupils' conversation. The first one is called Systemic Network Analysis (Tunnicliffe, 1995), which consist in coding qualitative parts of the speech for quantitative analysis; the second one is called Context of Meaning (Bloom, 1992), which consist in deviding part of the speech that refer to personal experiences, emations, methapors, and interpretative framework; the last one is the approach of Cosgrove and Schaverien (1996). This last approach consist in focusing on the ways in which pupils use conversations to deepen their understanding about the processes of science. They describe three kind of conversation: 1. coffe table, demonstration of something; 2. 'Feynman' discussion, discussion on an observed phenomena; 3. Critical or Galilean, actions carried out to test ipothesis. Each approach present an advantage on the others: Tunnicliffe's one is the best way for quantitative analisys; Bloom's approach shows how pupils made observations and talked about them through methaphors; Cosgrove and Schaveriens's approach highlight the significance of inter-pupil conversation.

Keywords: Speech analysis

Previous research on how young children comprehend graphical representations of numerical data show somewhat divergent results. The present study aims at investigating how lower primaqry students develop a basic understanding of graphics.

Two are the purposes of this study: to inverstigate different ways of conceiving graphics and to study the conceptual processes necessary for developing an understanding of graphs and charts. This study reports that children often have problems in going beyond the elementary level in interpreting the information when it is presented in a more elaborate way. The authors present a comparison between several studies on the field. The reviewed researchers' conceptions needed to understand graph are: perceptions of directions, references and distance. An interesting part of the study is dedicated to time. Real time is not quantitative (Bertin, 1967) and seeing time as continuous is an artefact (Gibson, 1979).

Keywords: Understanding of graphs

Altough an increasing body of research supports the view that preschoolers hold theory-like conceptions in the biological domain, most studies concerned have focused exclusively on early cenceptions of animals and humans. As a complement to such research the present studies examined 4-year-olds' conceptualization of seeds, a key stage of plant growth, itself a critical biological process.

This study highligths two important bias: Bias of Attribuition, preschool and early elementary-school-age children from several cultures consistently fail to classify plants as living or to attribute properties of living things to them, whereas alder children generally respond in an adult manner; Bias of Meaning, The nature of the term ``alive'' is confusing because children might interpret it as synonymous with ``animate''.

Keywords: Mental models

Understanding that only living things must act to gain self-beneficial goals is important for developing a theory-like understanding of the living world. This research studied the models that preschoolers, fifth graders, and adults use to guide their predictions of self-beneficial, goal-directed (i.e., teleological) action. Four possible models have been suggested: finalist, complexity based, biology based, and animal based. [...] The evidence from these two studies suggests that preschoolers, unlike fifth graders and adults, predict teleological action for plants and animals on the basis of these entities' inferred psychological capacitioes.

Chidren (11-13 y.o.) have access to the biology based model for predicting teleological actions.

Keywords: Mental models, teleological actions

Technology education at the elementary and middle school levels has been undergoing major revisions in recent years. There are currently a variety of pedagogical approaches to introduce elementary and middle school students to the processes and content of technological know-how and knowledge. Given that there is an on-going debate about the nature of technology education and that current practices may be seen as transitional in nature, there are shortcomings in these practices that need to be addressed. [...] I will illustrate how the introduction of what I call a ``standard model'' can be used to help students develop some basic scientific understanding, which can then be applied to making a more effective design.

The author reflect on the idea that students need to reflect on the processes by which they arrive at a final prototype in order to develop an understanding of the design process. The paper underlines that in order to have a meaningful integration of science-type activities during the course of a design project is possible to use a three-phase approach: 1. open exploration, students are free to try out their own ideas attempting to build something that is functional but usually not very efficient; 2. standard model, this is used to carry out sistematic testing; 3. raturn to the design process. Why do we need to push students to follow specific task to learn the ``standard model''? And besides, how can the standard model be learned?

Keywords: Technology design

We describe the use of manipulatives to teach the fundamental concept of limiting factors and we present a series of questions you can use to test whether your students are harboring some of the most common misconceptions about limiting factors.

This paper support the idea that manipulatives are helpful in the learning process enhancing problem solving and critical thinking skills. Another interesting point of this paper is that the authors focused on limiting factors in a ecosystem. In this perspective they dealed with a Multivariate system in which factors influence each others. They decided to stick on the idea of ``limiting factor'': the one abiotic factor that is most limiting to a given species in a given location at a given time. Altough an over-presence of such factor can also be limiting, they decided to focus only with substances that are limiting due to their low availability. Acoordingly with Ball (1992), authors affirm that students will not automaticaly draw conclusions their teachers want simply interacting with particular manipulatives. So, in this regard an istructional strategy is proposed. A 12 step process is proposed. Some of these phases seem to be relevant for our context: 1. Examination of Materials and Their Attributes 2. Problem Solving Using the Manipulatives 3. Discussion of How Students Have Represented the Processes and Solutions to the Problem 4. Extension of the Experience by Exploring Context that Have the Same or Similar Problem Solving Requirements 5. Discussion of the General Similarities and Differencies in the Problems This seems to be a good framework in which situate our evaluation. Is this framework going to be raised spontanously by the children? Can be superimposed on the activities to enhance and contextualise the learning process? Is there any cognitive KEY in this process?

Keywords: manipulatives, food webs, biogeochemical cycle, misconceptions

There is a growing interest in role-playing activities, both in school classrooms and in the culture at large. Despite this growing interest, role-playing activities are rare in mathematics and science classrooms. In social-studies activities, a mayor goalis to help students adopt the perspective of another person. However, mathematics and science classes typically discurage this kind of perspective-taking; science is usually taught as a process of deatached observation and analysis of phenomena, not active participation within phenomena. In this article we argue that role-playing activities can play a powerfull role in mathematics and science education.

In this paper several role-playing activities are presented. The basic assumption made is that thinking with your own body makes the pushes the learning process. Papert describes this process as ``sintonic learning''. Through a series of activities participants are encouraged to start thinking in a decentralized manner and reflecting on real phenomena that follow the same patterns. Technological solution to support these exploration are envisioned (Borovoy, 1996).

Keywords: Role-Playing activities, decentralized thinking

We present the System Bloks, a new physical interactive system that makes it easier for kids to explore dynamic systems. A set of computationally enhanced children bloks, made of woods and electronics, the System Blocks can assist k-12 educators to teach the complex concepts of system dinamics and casualities. System dinamics and system thinking are methods for studying the world around us. They deal with understanding how complex systems change over time, and how structure influences behaviour. In this paper we will showhow the System Blocks enable young children (as early as four years old) to create and interact with systems that simulate real-life dynamic behavior such as a bank account; population growth; or the delicate equilibrium of an ecosystem. The System Blocks gives young children a hands-on environment to learn about complex behavior and encourages new ways of thinking.

This paper describe a phisical interface for system dinamics simulation. The System Blocks a prototype wood-box kit has been developed to support the exploration of feedback systems. Six blocks have been developed: Sender, Accumulator, Delay, Multiplier, Converter and MIDI. Using these blocks is possible to create several different configurations like a 'reinforcing feedback loop' or a 'balancing feedback loop'. The evaluation side is not well developed.

Keywords: System dynamics, System thinking, Digital manipulatives, Toys, Construction kit, Simulation, Education

How does the newborn homan, who does not even possess well-organized circadian rhythms and whose bursts of alert experience rapidly wax and wane, eventually become capable of constructing the elaborate edifice that is the adult's world of time? The developmental psychology of time is an attempt to answer such questions and, less obviously, to help us understand the structure of the edifice itself.

This paper report on children perception of time form the classical Piaggetian studies up to the most recent discoveries in the psychology of perception.

Keywords: Understanding of time

Do the ideas that children's possess represent coherent models of the phenomena that are frequentely presented in classroom settings?Experienced teachers realize that children do have their own ideas about phenomena , even if at times, these ideas may seem incoherent. These ideas iften persist even when they are not consisten with experimental results or the explaination of the teacher. They are stablke ideas. This book present a possible moden on how these ideas affect the learning process. One of the possible solution reported seems to suggest that student must have choice of learning experiences so that, possibly, misconceptions can be challenged directly by experiences which conflict with expectations.

Keywords: Children early ideas

This article describes the usage of handheld technolgy in a classrom environment. This kind of technology can be used for datalogging as an enquiry tool.

Keywords: PDA, sensor technologies

Currently, there is much research work investigating the teaching and learning of plant nutrition in several different countries. This article briefly summarizes the findings of some of this work, including the work undertaken by the Children's Learning in Science Project (Bell and Driver, 1984).

This paper summarizes the distance between the misconceptions found in children's thinking by several authors and the goal conception expected at the end of formal instruction.

Keywords: children early ideas

Altough user-centered design is a well-supported concept in the literature on adult computer products, not until recently have pubblications begun to appear addressing the need to include the user in the design process of children's computer products. Good examples are a recent panel discussion in interactions on the importance of understanding the perspectives and needs of children, and the energizing work of Allison Druin and Cynthia Solomon.

This paper descirbes some basic usability guidelines when working with children. It suggest the need to devide children in three common target age ranges: preschool (from 2 to 5), elementary school ( from 6 to 10 years) and middle school (from 11 to 14).

Keywords: Usability testing

This document explain the basic for the connection of a sensor board to the iPaq PocketPC.

Keywords: PDA, Sensor technologies

This paper has two aims. First, it reviews literature about conceptual change and about the study of concepts more broadly. The principal claim is that much prior work has suffered from inexplicitness and imprecision in terms of what constitutes a concept. Second, we introduce a theory of one particular type of concept. A coordination class is a systematic collection of strategies for reading a certain type of information out from the world. We identify both structural components and performance properties of coordination classes. Using this theory, we analyse protocol data from a student with respect to the difficult concept of force in Newtonian mechanics.

Keywords: Conceptual change

Keywords: Primary, Schooling, Science, Environment, Situated learning, children, Curriculum, integration, Knowledge, Culture

We are establishing a collaborative network of museums to engage youth and their families in more creative and inventive uses of new technologies. By taking a playful approach to invention, and integrating engineering with artistic expression, the PIE network provides support for a broader and more diverse range of people to see themselves as inventors. The PIE Network spreads its ideas by hosting make-your-own workshops, publishing online and printed materials, and organizing MindFest events gatherings of playful inventors of all ages.

Keywords: Science Enquiry

Previous studies of children's understanding of the life concept have focused on their views of the life status of animals and nonliving objects. Little attention has been given to the comparison of plants and animals. We studied Israeli 6- to 15-years-olds in an effort to enhance understanding on this issue.

Keywords: Biology, Culture, Education, Language, Life judgments, Plants, Science

Altough Piaget characterized young children asa prfecausal until about 7-8 years of age, recent work indicates that preschoolers do honor fundamental principles of causality. This literature has mainly focused on general principles invoked in reasoning about mechanical events. By contrast, the present study examined whether children differentiate between the causal mechanisms appropriate for different conceptual domains. The result of 3 preliminary investigationand 1 main experiment suggested that preschoolers prefer natural mechanisms for color inheritance in biological kinds, particularly when causal substrates resemble their consequences. By contrast, the same children recognised the importance of human intentions in producing the color of an artifact, and also, judged that mechanical mechanisms serve to mediate between intentions and outocomes. The results are relevant to recent studies on the development of biological thought, and overall suggest that early causal reasoning reflects both domain-specific and domain-general principles.

Keywords: Causal reasoning

Five experiments investigated children's intuitions about genetic transmission of features. After parent animals possessing an abnormal feature were describede, children were asked wheter their baby would be born with that fearture in abnormal or normal form. Features were either internal or external, inborn or acquired after birth and had functional or non functional consequences for the parents. Among preschoolers, features with functional consequesnces were consideredinherited much more frequentely than any other type, but only when the functional consequences were biological rather than social or psychological. Older children demonstrated more awareness of the inheritance of inborn traits. Overall, the results suggest young children have principled, specifically biological notions of inheritance.

Keywords: Children eraly ideas

Three studies with 149 children were conducted to provide informations about development of the perceptions pf temporally unidirectional transformations, such ar dropping blocks or breaking a cookie. Children 3,5 through 6,5 years of age compared forward or backward videotapes of events or made individual judgments of what would happen if the actions were attempted. Even children 3,5 to 4,5 years of age recognised the anomaly of backward versions of gravity and separation events. In addition, relatively few children predicted impossible transformations in the prediction task. The result shows that young children, like adults, are sensitive to the unidirectional nature of varied transformations.

This study reports on the understanding of particular subset of dynamic events, temporally unidirectional or ``arrows of time'' (Friedman, 2002). Arrows of time are common in everyday perception and include such events as the motion of pouring a liquid and breaking an objects in pieces. This study shows that children of about 4 years of age are sensitive to the anomaly of backward presentation of such events. This study support the idea that accelerating or reversing an unidirectional process we are not altering the comprehension of the phenomena.

Keywords: Children early ideas

This paper presents a prototype learning environment for children to create their own knowledge about multivariate systems. We developed a virtual world linked to a tabletop-sized physical dome in which children experiment with envirojnmental parameters affecting plant growth. A key concern of the design was giving children control of the temporal domain, allowing for the playful exploration of cause-and-effect relationships. We show how this resulted in a tool in which children may create, exhibit and reflect upon their own knowledge by challenging and exploring their conceptions of variable interactions.

Keywords: Multivariate Systems, Learning Technologies, Design for Learning, Physical Interface, Virtual world, Constructionism

Altough children's understanding of the concept of life has been studied extensively in the past 50 years, findings have been contradictory. Soime results have supported Piaget's contention that children identify life with function, motion, or autonomous motion; other results have not. The 4 experiments of our study were designed to establish the conditions under which children exhibitsdifferent understanding of life by varying task requirements within a common procedural framework. When children were asked either to name living things or to judge the life status of particular entities, they almost never indicated that inanimate objects were alive.

Keywords: Life judgements