Scientific Concepts and Reflection

Vygotsky and Piaget: scientific concepts

Jean Piaget’s so-called biological perspective is often paired with the viewpoint of Lev Vygotsky when we speak of learning in humans. Both authors acknowledged the active role of children in the construction of knowledge. However, they differ in that, unlike Piaget, Vygotsky believed that the assimilation of new information does not have to wait for an appropriate level of development but must...

Architectural Reflection: Concepts, Design, and Evaluation

This paper proposes a novel reflective approach, orthogonal to the classic computational approach, whereby a system performs computation on its software architecture instead of individual components. The approach supports system’s self-management activities such as dynamic reconfiguration to be realized in a systematic and conceptually clean way and added to existing systems without modifying t...

Scientific Visualization: Advanced Concepts

The display of surfaces and solids has usually been restricted to the domain of scientific visualization; however, little work has been done on the visualization of surfaces and solids of dimensionality higher than three or four. Indeed, most high-dimensional visualization focuses on the display of data points. However, the ability to effectively model and visualize higher dimensional objects s...

Sensitization: reciprocity and reflection in scientific practice

Bob Dylan sang that “the times, they are a-changin’” with reference to the profound social upheaval of the 1960s in the USA and Western Europe; but he could just as easily have been referring to the changes in the perception and conduct of scientific research in that period. Before and throughout the Second World War, science was regarded to be a somewhat disconnected, exclusive activity. Scien...

Early Comprehension of Scientific Concepts