Generally Useful Questions

The Sounding Board, when tailored to help its clients with a specific problem, can contain some questions which are quite specific to that problem. However, that does not mean that a developer needs to start from scratch when customizing Sounding Board. Even tailored versions of the program find it useful to ask a variety of quite general questions of the type the program already contains. Some examples are:

Questions about objects:

• Where does one usually find items like X?
• Who usually uses items like X?
• What are items like X usually used for?
• What problems do items like X cause?
• Why do people want items like X?

Questions about actions and events:

• What usually causes X to occur?
• What does X usually cause?
• Who performs actions like X?

Questions about Agents:

• What motivates X to act as he does?
• How does X get the resources to act as he does?
• Why didn't X do action Y instead of action Z?

Sounding Board and Learning by Reflection

Where am I in the content of the book?

• Why are there so many obvious questions in Sounding Board?

• What does a dialog in Sounding Board look like?

• What are the questions like in Sounding Board?

• What is the role of the teacher in the sounding board model of teaching?
• What is the basic premise underlying Sounding Board?
• How does Sounding Board use the learning by reflection architecture?