of Education and Learning Sciences
IDEA was an advanced software environment created to help adolescents acquire and use systematic decision analysis skills, and for studying the acquisition of generalizable thinking skills as supported by new technologies.
IDEA was initially developed as part of the Cognitive Skills for an Information Age Project that I directed at Bank Street's Center for Children and Technology (1984-1986), with support from IBM Corporation, and from 1986-1987 was re-designed and developed by my group at NYU with InterLisp-D on a Xerox Dandelion computer.
See: Thornburg, D.G., & Pea, R.D. (1990). Synthesizing instructional technologies and educational culture: Exploring cognition and metacognition in the social studies. J. of Educational Computing Research.
The IDEA system was a featured demonstration in the video sessions at CHI-88 (Computer-Human Interaction SIG, Association for Computing Machinery.