• We follow the general philosophy behind experiential-based learning: When what we experience differs from the expected or intended, disequilibrium results and our adaptive (learning) process is triggered. Reflection on successful adaptive operations (reflective abstracting) leads to new or modified concepts. The challenge is to create learning environments that are complex enough to lead to unexpected experiences, but not too complex to be inaccessible to students.

• Unguided or minimally guided experience and reflection is not effective [ 7]. We must provide a structure and a set of plans that support the development of informed exploration and reflective inquiry without taking initiative or control away from students.

• We need to create a personally meaningful context for students. For a problem to foster the learning of powerful computing ideas, the students must accept it as their problem. We need to take noncontextu-alized computing ideas and embed them in a meaningful context for student investigation.

Our framework supports these
principles with a collection of soft-
ware tools, conceptual frameworks,
and guidelines, which we classify
into two groups (Figure 2):
• tools that facilitate the creation
of useful experiences for exploring
advanced computing technology, and
• tools that guide and support reflec-
tion on such experiences.

Creating experience. The key ele-
ment of our approach is empow-
ering students to have relevant
experiences with advanced com-
putational technologies, because
without such experiences, the stu-
dents do not have a basis to reflect
and learn. To support this goal, our
framework includes:
• a collection of software tools to
empower students to explore the
limitations and opportunities of
technologies without intensive pro-
gramming, and
• tools and spaces for creating the
contexts for such experiences.