One of the primary objectives of the project was to have the students actively participating in the design of the applets. Three oral de-briefing sessions were held in order to solicit the ideas and opinions of the students. In addition, each student completed a journal entry following a 40 minute session using the applets. The journal questions were aimed at gathering feedback on three issues:
The oral de-briefing sessions were especially fruitful. A similar phenomenon has been observed in other collaborative research studies with children [8]. The students were very keen on voicing their opinions and discussing with their classmates. They were much more critical and verbose than in their journal entries. They were also much more creative; it was during these sessions that the students suggested imaginative alternatives to the existing applets and even completely new approaches. One such approach was to use collaboration tools to create a game that could be played on different computers.