Closing The Cyberlearning Loop
Ashok Ram Basawapatna, Alexander Repenning, Kyu Han Koh · 2015
Teachers are increasingly integrating game design and simulation creation projects as part of their classroom curricula. These projects have many benefits including motivating students in STEM activities and exposing students to computational thinking - a key part of upcoming science standards. However, barriers still exist to project-based computer science in a lab environment. One major issue is that, as students are creating their projects, it is extremely difficult for teachers to know how every student is progressing through a given activity and how to keep every student engaged. This paper introduces a Cyberlearning system entitled REACT (Real-Time Evaluation and Assessment of Computational Thinking) that is an initial step towards giving teachers quickly discernible real-time data corresponding to each student project. REACT provides teachers with a sortable dashboard, consisting of data from each student, that shows the characters students created and used to populate their game or simulation world as well as the semantic meaning behind what students have programmed. A feasibility test with four middle school classrooms shows that REACT helps teachers formatively assess students and provide targeted instruction to struggling individuals. Furthermore, teachers showed excitement at the summative and student self-assessment capabilities of REACT, and every teacher independently stated they would use the REACT system in subsequent end-user programming units.