PSICOLOGIA & INFORMÁTICA - BVS Psicologia ULAPSI Brasil

TEMOS O PRAZER EM TRAZER CYBERRATPARA A ESCOLADavid Alan Eckerman, Laércia Abreu Vasconcelos e Lincoln da Silva GimenesInstituto de Psicologia, Universidade de BrasíliaBelow you will find how a student (an imaginary student), aninstructor (an imaginary instructor), and the CyberRat program designer(who has approved to this presentation) view the program namedCyberRat: The world’s premiere animal conditioning simulator(from Ray, 2006). The CyberRat program tries to make the lives ofthese three kinds of people happy and productive. With his Braziliancollaborators, the program designer is developing ways to make CyberRatavailable to instructors and students in Brazil. And, he is alsohoping to bring the other products of his company (AI) 2 , Inc to Brazilas well. These products include the MediaMatrix Adaptive InstructionalPublishing System (including the Learning & Conditioning Tutorials)and the Train-to-Code adaptive training system for teaching behavioraland observation skills. CyberRat and these other products maybe viewed at the company’s website (Ray, 2006). In descriptions thatfollow, please be attentive to the differences between what the Cyber-Rat simulation provides that distinguishes it from some other simulationproducts (Tomanari & Eckerman, 2004).STUDENT PERSPECTIVEMy instructor gave me the website that I visited to purchaseaccess to the CyberRat servers (actually, Roger Ray is developing severaloptions for payment in Brazil which can involve either individualstudents, instructor-based groups, schools, etc.). And, I receivedthe CD that contains the video files and program “core.” I installedthose on a computer my Dad is letting me use. And, I have installedQuicktime for Windows since CyberRat uses that video format (plansare being made for a downloadable set of video files so that a CD isnot needed). Actually, I can also use one of the computers at schoolwhere CyberRat has been installed. No problem, since the importantthing is that I’m registered at the CyberRat site and that I have astudent ID. I am now registering online for my section of my instructor’s2www.ai2.com178 | PSICOLOGIA & INFORMÁTICA