Janice Gobert, Paul Horwitz, Barbara Buckley, Amie Mansfield,
Edmund Burke, and Dimitry Markman Wedescribe the Modeling Across
the Curriculum Project (mac.concord.org; IERI # 0115699), a
project in which we developed and refined Pedagogica™ (Horwitz
and Burke 2002), a runtime and authoring environment, as well as
three interactive curricular units for high school science in
Genetics, Newtonian Mechanics, and Gas Laws. Pedagogica™
provides runtime support for scripting of Java components such
as general-purpose software tools, manipulable models, and
assessments that pose challenges to students; Pedagogica™ also
monitors what students do with the models and tools. The scripts
enable a researcher or curriculum developer to control all
aspects of the learner’s interaction with software tools by
changing the nature of the scaffolding and the assessments
provided (Gobert et al, 2004). Our curricular activities for
Biology (Genetics), Physics (Newtonian Mechanics), and Chemistry
(Gas Laws) combine aspects of open-e