I thought the most impressive part of the EDC was the design of the reflection and action spaces. Choosing to create such a design has a vast number of benefits and future improvements. The fact that the members could track the cost of their changes to the bus routes in the reflection space while changing the route in the action space was awesome. Looking at the EDC though, it suffers the problem that programs like Sim City suffers in that it's not extensible or able to move to another problem set. It seems that the EDC works fine if given a set domain of a neighborhood. If the roads and city lines are well defined then adding to that picture is easy. What if the group found that a light rail is a viable option, though? Could they add a light rail route? Add bridges? Redirect roads? Also with the growing popularity of Web 2.0 it would be advantageous to add search features to the reflection space so that when they say "how much would a light rail cost" there is an answer immediately and not after they go home individually. Such breakdowns in the collaboration only set back the work done by the group in that once they've encountered a roadblock that can't be answered by the reflection space they revert back to non-experts and pretty much have nothing else to discuss. Future improvements to the reflection space need to make discovery and research further integrated while the action space would need to grow its database of objects and provide real-time modification of roads, parks, etc.
I thought the most impressive part of the EDC was the design of the reflection and action spaces. Choosing to create such a design has a vast number of benefits and future improvements. The fact that the members could track the cost of their changes to the bus routes in the reflection space while changing the route in the action space was awesome.
Looking at the EDC though, it suffers the problem that programs like Sim City suffers in that it's not extensible or able to move to another problem set. It seems that the EDC works fine if given a set domain of a neighborhood. If the roads and city lines are well defined then adding to that picture is easy. What if the group found that a light rail is a viable option, though? Could they add a light rail route? Add bridges? Redirect roads? Also with the growing popularity of Web 2.0 it would be advantageous to add search features to the reflection space so that when they say "how much would a light rail cost" there is an answer immediately and not after they go home individually. Such breakdowns in the collaboration only set back the work done by the group in that once they've encountered a roadblock that can't be answered by the reflection space they revert back to non-experts and pretty much have nothing else to discuss. Future improvements to the reflection space need to make discovery and research further integrated while the action space would need to grow its database of objects and provide real-time modification of roads, parks, etc.