Introduction to Indie

What is Indie?

Indie is a web-based tool for authoring and delivering interactive "Investigate and Decide" scenarios for learning and assessment. Indie is intended for teaching and assessing skills in evidence gathering, analysis, and deductively sound evidence-based conclusions.

Indie provides a simple interactive browser-based interface that allows students to pursue their investigations in whatever order they choose. Indie requires no programming by scenario authors. Authors use HTML pages and simple web forms to describe the challenge, background materials, and the tests students can run.

No special plug-ins or other software are needed to run or create Indie scenarios. Indie requires only modern standards-compliant web browsers.

Who developed Indie?

Indie was developed by Lin Qiu and Chris Riesbeck, both of the Computer Science Department at Northwestern University, as part of the VaNTH ERC. It was inspired by a previous standalone system for Macintosh computers, developed by Wolff Dobson, Seth Tisue and Chris Riesbeck at the Institute for the Learning Sciences at Northwestern University.

Work on this version of Indie was supported primarily by the Engineering Research Centers Program of the National Science Foundation under Award Number EEC-9876363.

What do I need to run Indie?

If you are reading this file, you can probably run Indie right now, as a demo user. All you need is a modern standards-compliant browser, e.g., the current versions of Firefox, Internet Explorer, Mozilla, Netscape, or Opera. Javascript must be enabled in the browser, both to create Indie scenarios, and to run them.

No software has to be installed on your computer to use Indie. No files are created or modified on your computer. Indie maintains all files on a server.

What are Indie scenarios like?

All Indie scenarios have the same basic structure:

The challenge
The investigation
The report

The challenge

The challenge describes a problem the student has to solve. The problem can be anything requiring the gathering of (simulated) data. In simple scenarios the challenge is simple HTML text and/or pictures, but any web media could be used. Examples of challenges appropriate for Indie scenarios include:

What's wrong with this patient?
Why are pipes corroding so quickly at this paper processing plant?
What is the chemical composition of this mystery substance?
What is the likelihood that this volcano will erupt in the near future?
What's the best location for a high-end bicycle shop?

The investigation

The heart of an Indie scenario is the investigation. This is where the student explores background materials to learn about a domain, and performs tests of some form to gather data about the current scenario.

Background materials are texts giving more information about the domain and the scenario. The texts can be web pages stored with the Indie scenario and available in the Reference Library section of the Indie student interface, or they can be general materials available elsewhere.

Tests are (simulated) experiments the student can run to gather data about the scenario. The Indie student interface lets students review the set of available tests, choose tests to run, optionally specifying additional parameters, and see the data returned by those tests in the current scenario. Examples of tests include:

In a medical scenario, there would be tests for measuring a patient's temperature, blood pressure, and white blood cell count.
In the pipe corrosion scenario, there would be tests for measuring the pH and SO₄ levels at various locations in the paper processing plant, and for ordering specific types of bacterial cultures to be grown.
In a market analysis scenario, doing surveys and gathering economic and demographics statistics about various neighborhoods.

The report

The report is where the student uses the data gathered from the tests to support a diagnosis. The challenge is to determine which data is relevant and what hypotheses the data supports or contradicts.

The Indie student interface lets students specify an hypothesis, select the test results that support that hypothesis, and give the reasons for their choices. For example,

In a medical scenario, the student might use a high temperature and elevated white blood cell count as evidence that a patient has influenza.
In the pipe corrosion scenario, a student might use the presence of higher levels of sulfur in the water before the corrosion site to argue that sulfate-reducing bacteria at the site are causing the problem.

How hard is it to create an Indie scenario?

No programming is involved. All the code for presenting information to the students, recording what they've done, and so on, is already written.

Instead, what you do is:

Write texts for the challenge and any background information you want to give.
Define the tests the students can run.

The texts are HTML pages. For short plain texts, you can use a simple browser-based text editor that Indie provides. For more complicated pages, with images and so on, you can use any HTML editor you like, even Microsoft Word, and then use Indie to upload the files to the server.

You define a test using Indie's web forms to specify:

a name, e.g., "take temperature"
a brief description
the result(s) to be returned if the student runs the test, e.g., "102 F"

For more challenging scenarios, you can also specify costs for tests, time delays, and test options that need to be specified, such as location, type of instrument to use, and so on.

How do I try out Indie?

Click here to try running or modifying an Indie scenario.

For more information, and for an account that will let you save scenario results past your current session, or create new scenarios, please send email to c-riesbeck@northwestern.edu. Put Indie Account Request in the Subject, and a brief description of who you are and what you'd like to use Indie for. All information is kept confidential.