The Tablet Game
Fred G. Martin, Chike Abuah, Subhajit Chakrabarty, David Trung Nguyen, Mark Sherman, Diane Schilder · 2018
Assessing students' learning of concepts in programming is an essential part of teaching computer science. We developed the Tablet Game, an embedded assessment that measures students' skill in identifying programming structures used to create various behaviors in MIT App Inventor. The assessment was implemented as an app for Android devices. Students conducted an activity in the app, and identified which code-blocks would create those behaviors. Students' responses were transmitted to our custom data-collection server. In two five-day app development summer camps held with middle school students, students completed the same Tablet Game assessment on day 1 and day 5. Students also completed pre/post surveys which gathered ethnographic data and asked about interest levels in computer science and prior programming experience. Using data from 44 students with pre/post assessments matched to surveys, our results indicated that (1) students with high self-reported prior experience in App Inventor outperformed students with low prior experience on the Tablet Game pre-test, indicating that the assessment measures programming skill and (2) students with low prior experience achieved equivalent results as the high prior experience cohort in the post-test, indicating that the camp was successful in imparting programming skills. Both of these results are statistically significant. Further, (3) there were no statistically significant differences in gender composition of the two experience cohorts, indicating that the camp was equally accessible to girls and boys.