Ethics Invention and Discovery: A Multimedia Course Proposal

Michael Gorman, Engineering (TCC/SEAS)

1996 TTI Fellow

Project website: http://repo-nt.tcc.virginia.edu

Professor Gorman teaches courses on the psychology of discovery and invention to engineering students. Gorman believes that the best way for students to learn this fascinating but inherently complex subject is to have them reproduce the key experiments of great inventors like Bell, Faraday, and Edison. But one problem that confronts this hands-on approach to history is the prohibitive cost, in time and money, of recreating laboratory conditions for a number of students.In repsonse to this problem, Gorman is developing--with the aid of the World Wide Web and the new, object-oriented programming langauge "Java"--a series of virtual experiments with which the students can interact. In one example, students are presented with the same materials Bell had at his disposal when invented the telephone. These materials--simple resistors, batteries, etc.--appear on the computer screen as moveable icons with adjustable values which students can set and combine in different ways. Based on known laws of physics, different arrangements produce different results, just as in a "live" experiment.At a more profound level, Gorman wants his students to understand and adopt the cognitive processes which guided the creation and interpretation of the great experiments. In this connection he makes use of the fact that the great inventors kept detailed notebooks of their work. These notebooks provide important clues to the complex process by which the mind proceeds from the imaginary to the real. Based on the structure of these notebooks, Gorman is developing an interactive notebook on the computer that will prompt students to record key elements of the discovery process, including observations from actual experiments and details of thought experiments. In addition, the program will aid students in the cultivation of what Gorman believes to be a key to the cognition of creativity: the rich, non-verbal, visual models that all great inventors seem to have had behind their experiments.