Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Microworlds are educational environments intended to support the student in the active exploration of a subject-matter domain. W e present preliminary work whose goal is to attain a better understanding of the educational effectiveness of microworlds through an examination of the learning processes that they exploit. The learning processes are made explicit within a computational model of the interaction between a student and a microworld for simple electrostatics. W e focus, in particular, on the implementation of an episodic memory mechanism that gives insight into the processes involved in learning from incorrect behavior.