The students participated in approximately 12 forty minute sessions each and used a total of sixteen applets. Their feedback over this time as well as the teacher's observations gave strong indications of the strengths and weaknesses of the applets. The strengths lay mostly in the interactive nature of the applets.
Students enjoyed experimenting with different values and shapes; they were able to manipulate the shapes and create patterns with them that would have taken much more time (and frustration) on paper. The colourful and playful aspect afforded by the JavaBeans was also very motivating for the younger students. Another strength was the breadth of concepts that these applets allowed the students to encounter. Whereas transformations are traditionally taught as a self-contained geometry module, these applets bridged across the curriculum from number concepts through geometry to relations and functions.
The major weakness was the lack of interface components specifically designed to provide tutorial-like support. These include:
Another concern which arose was the impact of cooperative learning in a single learner context. Although the students were able to adapt very well to this working environment and gleen valuable experiences from exchanges with their partners (and amongst groups), there was no effort to design the applets for multi-user contexts. The students adapted by sharing control of the mouse and the keyboard so that each partner was responsible for certain functionalities. This seemed to work well. However, more effective means of sharing a learning environment are desirable; these issues have been addressed by other studies [7,15].