Planning for Life - Educate Students to Plan: Syntactic and Semantic Support of Planning Activities with a Visual Language

Organising their own learning processes is a hard challenge for students. This is especially pronounced in self-regulated, collaborative and constructionist learning situations where students are supposed to jointly create artefacts, plan their work and learn how to learn together. In this paper we present our work on the support of the planning activities. The support happens both at the syntactic level, i.e. how to make correct plans, and the semantic level, i.e. how to make meaningful plans. We describe our concept of a visual language to specify plans, our different support functionalities and demonstrate its use with an extended practical example as well as some empirical evidence and consequences for experimentation plans gained from practical classroom experimentation.