Psychological research has established that the way problems are represented affects mental models that are activated, the strategies a solver might employ to solve the problem, and the problem solving success. In the education of IT-related subjects, such as computer science or IT security, problems are often complex and overwhelming for first-year studies. We suggest that providing problems to student in depictive instead of descriptive representations may yield more successful problem solving and will test this hypothesis in the field of Boolean logic. More precisely, we have developed a representation of Boolean networks that we expect to be better suited for novices to work on than the traditional, abstract representation. De-camouflaging, the process of determining the identities of concealed logic gates within a network, will serve as a task by which the usefulness of our representation will be tested. Naieve participants will thus solve de-camouflaging tasks on both our novel, depictive, representation as well as the traditional, descriptive, representation. In our talk at the International Conference on Human-Computer-Interaction, we will report in how far the two representations differentially affect problem solving success, strategies used, and the subjective experience of participants working on this task.
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