Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Approach, Technologies and Goals This paper describes a set of educational tools designed to support central cognitive skills such as argument analysis and construction, cooperative negotation, collaborative writing and scientific inquiry. In building these tools we drew upon multi-media technologies, interactive video and object-oriented programming techniques. Our approach however, was not motivated by the technologies but rather by a desire to embed our educational objectives in situations which were intrinsically interesting to the students. This approach, alluded to in the title of the paper, came out of our intention to have the student feel good about her personal interests, and further to have her feel good about her intellectual competence as a vehicle for furthering her interests.