Software for constructing and reflecting on diagrams of one's ideas

Belvedere 4.1 is designed to help support problem-based collaborative learning scenarios with concept and evidence moodels, and provides multiple representational views (tables and graphs) on those models.

Belvedere was originally intended to help secondary school students learn critical inquiry skills that they can apply in everyday life as well as in science, but can be adopted to other applications as well.

Here are some screen shots of Belvedere in action. Click on the thumbnail to look at a full screen capture.

Simple Model	Concept Map	Evidence Map with Matrix View

Educators interested in Belvedere are encouraged to download the software and join the user mailing list. To learn more about using Belvedere in the classroom go to the LILT Belvedere web page.

Developers interested in Belvedere are encouraged to visit the Belvedere Sourceforge home page and the Belvedere CVS web interface. Upon CVS download, the source files can be found in:

CVS ROOT/src/belvedere/

and scripts for building (build.sh or build.bat) and running (belstart.sh or belstart.bat) can be found in:

CVS ROOT/build/

Originally developed by Alan Lesgold, Dan Suthers and colleagues while at the Learning and Resource Development Center at the University of Pittsburgh, the third and fourth generations of Belvedere were engineered at the Laboratory for Interactive Learning Technology (LILT) at the University of Hawaii under the direction of Dan Suthers and with support from the National Science Foundation (grants #9873516 and #0093505). Belvedere 4 was programmed by David Burger. Several other experimental versions of Belvedere also exist at LILT.