Educators continue to face significant challenges in providing high quality, post-secondary instruction in large classes including: motivating and engaging diverse populations (e.g., academic ability and backgrounds, generational expectations); and providing helpful feedback and guidance. Researchers investigate solutions to these kinds of challenges from alternative perspectives, including learning analytics (LA). Here, LA techniques are applied to explore the data collected for a large, flipped introductory programming class to (1) identify groups of students with similar patterns of performance and engagement; and (2) provide them with more meaningful appraisals that are tailored to help them effectively master the learning objectives. Two studies are reported, which apply clustering to analyze the class population, followed by an analysis of a subpopulation with extreme behaviours.
{"title":"Using Learning Analytics to Investigate Patterns of Performance and Engagement in Large Classes","authors":"Hassan Khosravi, K. Cooper","doi":"10.1145/3017680.3017711","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3017680.3017711","url":null,"abstract":"Educators continue to face significant challenges in providing high quality, post-secondary instruction in large classes including: motivating and engaging diverse populations (e.g., academic ability and backgrounds, generational expectations); and providing helpful feedback and guidance. Researchers investigate solutions to these kinds of challenges from alternative perspectives, including learning analytics (LA). Here, LA techniques are applied to explore the data collected for a large, flipped introductory programming class to (1) identify groups of students with similar patterns of performance and engagement; and (2) provide them with more meaningful appraisals that are tailored to help them effectively master the learning objectives. Two studies are reported, which apply clustering to analyze the class population, followed by an analysis of a subpopulation with extreme behaviours.","PeriodicalId":344382,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 2017 ACM SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-03-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123132835","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
"The education of all software engineering students must include student experiences with the professional practice of software engineering." There have been many models proposed to include professional practice in computer science and software engineering curricula. Some schools simulate professional practice in the classroom with large term or multi-term projects. Others require students to engage in professional practice outside of the classroom in an internship or co-op program. We have been exploring an alternative approach to integrating professional practice into our computer science curriculum. In our approach, we partner with an external software consulting company who employs our students directly. Students telecommute from campus and are engaged directly in real-world software development projects. We provide an academic advisor to help guide the development of the program, look for learning opportunities in the work, and mentor students. We describe our approach, solutions to the challenges we faced, and the direct and indirect benefits of our approach.
{"title":"CORP: Co-operative Remote Practicum Work Experience Model for Software Engineering Education","authors":"Dannie M. Stanley","doi":"10.1145/3017680.3017710","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3017680.3017710","url":null,"abstract":"\"The education of all software engineering students must include student experiences with the professional practice of software engineering.\" There have been many models proposed to include professional practice in computer science and software engineering curricula. Some schools simulate professional practice in the classroom with large term or multi-term projects. Others require students to engage in professional practice outside of the classroom in an internship or co-op program. We have been exploring an alternative approach to integrating professional practice into our computer science curriculum. In our approach, we partner with an external software consulting company who employs our students directly. Students telecommute from campus and are engaged directly in real-world software development projects. We provide an academic advisor to help guide the development of the program, look for learning opportunities in the work, and mentor students. We describe our approach, solutions to the challenges we faced, and the direct and indirect benefits of our approach.","PeriodicalId":344382,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 2017 ACM SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education","volume":"44 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-03-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124763249","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This paper presents a methodology for creating challenge problems using a simulation environment for a hardware robot-based programming competition. Hosted each spring for K-14 students, the competition is based on hardware robots and lessons which have been used by students within their math, science, and engineering classes throughout the school year. RoboSim is a simulator which complements the control scheme for the hardware robots and is used regularly by the students to supplement running the hardware robots. For the first time RoboSim was used to design the challenges which have been given to students for the 2016 RoboPlay Challenge Competition. Using virtual robots for designing the competition allows more efficient design and testing of the new challenges with new features compared to using only hardware robots. The code which is used to control the robots is unchanged between the hardware and virtual robots making the transition to hardware robots trivial. All challenges from previous RoboPlay competitions are also available to students within RoboSim for testing within the classroom.
{"title":"Making Robot Challenges with Virtual Robots","authors":"Kevin J. Gucwa, Harry H. Cheng","doi":"10.1145/3017680.3017700","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3017680.3017700","url":null,"abstract":"This paper presents a methodology for creating challenge problems using a simulation environment for a hardware robot-based programming competition. Hosted each spring for K-14 students, the competition is based on hardware robots and lessons which have been used by students within their math, science, and engineering classes throughout the school year. RoboSim is a simulator which complements the control scheme for the hardware robots and is used regularly by the students to supplement running the hardware robots. For the first time RoboSim was used to design the challenges which have been given to students for the 2016 RoboPlay Challenge Competition. Using virtual robots for designing the competition allows more efficient design and testing of the new challenges with new features compared to using only hardware robots. The code which is used to control the robots is unchanged between the hardware and virtual robots making the transition to hardware robots trivial. All challenges from previous RoboPlay competitions are also available to students within RoboSim for testing within the classroom.","PeriodicalId":344382,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 2017 ACM SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education","volume":"7 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-03-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125526344","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Vivek Paramasivam, Justin Huang, Sarah Elliott, M. Cakmak
Robots are becoming popular in Computer Science outreach to K-12 students. Easy-to-program toy robots already exist as commercial educational products. These toys take advantage of the increased interest and engagement resulting from the ability to write code that makes a robot physically move. However, toy robots do not demonstrate the potential of robots to carry out useful everyday tasks. On the other hand, functional robots are often difficult to program even for professional software developers or roboticists. In this work, we apply end-user programming tools for functional robots to the Computer Science outreach context. This experience report describes two offerings of a week-long introductory workshop in which students with various disabilities learned to program a Clearpath Turtlebot, capable of delivering items, interacting with people via touchscreen, and autonomously navigating its environment. We found that the robot and the end-user programming tool that we developed in previous work were successful in provoking interest in Computer Science among both groups of students and in establishing confidence among students that programming is both accessible and interesting. We present key observations from the workshops, lessons learned, and suggestions for readers interested in employing a similar approach.
{"title":"Computer Science Outreach with End-User Robot-Programming Tools","authors":"Vivek Paramasivam, Justin Huang, Sarah Elliott, M. Cakmak","doi":"10.1145/3017680.3017796","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3017680.3017796","url":null,"abstract":"Robots are becoming popular in Computer Science outreach to K-12 students. Easy-to-program toy robots already exist as commercial educational products. These toys take advantage of the increased interest and engagement resulting from the ability to write code that makes a robot physically move. However, toy robots do not demonstrate the potential of robots to carry out useful everyday tasks. On the other hand, functional robots are often difficult to program even for professional software developers or roboticists. In this work, we apply end-user programming tools for functional robots to the Computer Science outreach context. This experience report describes two offerings of a week-long introductory workshop in which students with various disabilities learned to program a Clearpath Turtlebot, capable of delivering items, interacting with people via touchscreen, and autonomously navigating its environment. We found that the robot and the end-user programming tool that we developed in previous work were successful in provoking interest in Computer Science among both groups of students and in establishing confidence among students that programming is both accessible and interesting. We present key observations from the workshops, lessons learned, and suggestions for readers interested in employing a similar approach.","PeriodicalId":344382,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 2017 ACM SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education","volume":"55 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-03-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126748713","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
K. Haynie, Jeff Gray, S. Packman, Carol Crawford, Mary Boehm, Jonathan Corley
This poster describes how this project has induced teacher preparation and broadened student participation in Computer Science Principles throughout Alabama from 2013-2016. We will describe our professional development (PD) model, gain for participating instructors, results of CS Principles course implementations, and student engagement and outcomes. A statewide and scalable "Teacher Leader" model of professional development was implemented throughout the project. In person training was coupled with on-line course content, geographically proximal teacher groups, and periodic teacher hangouts. Teachers in each cohort collaborated together on developing course content and pedagogy, fostered by peer leaders from earlier cohorts. Instructors encouraged and engaged their students; student agreed that the learning environments supported diversity. Students gained significantly in core computer science content (i.e., abstraction and algorithms) as well as computational thinking practices. Female students showed robust gains on a number of indicators (including higher course grades than males); under-represented minority students showed positive gains in content knowledge. The majority of students said they were likely or possibly likely to pursue computer science in college, and that taking CS Principles impacted their decisions.
{"title":"A Final Project Report on CS4Alabama: A Statewide Professional Development Initiative for CS Principles (Abstract Only)","authors":"K. Haynie, Jeff Gray, S. Packman, Carol Crawford, Mary Boehm, Jonathan Corley","doi":"10.1145/3017680.3022420","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3017680.3022420","url":null,"abstract":"This poster describes how this project has induced teacher preparation and broadened student participation in Computer Science Principles throughout Alabama from 2013-2016. We will describe our professional development (PD) model, gain for participating instructors, results of CS Principles course implementations, and student engagement and outcomes. A statewide and scalable \"Teacher Leader\" model of professional development was implemented throughout the project. In person training was coupled with on-line course content, geographically proximal teacher groups, and periodic teacher hangouts. Teachers in each cohort collaborated together on developing course content and pedagogy, fostered by peer leaders from earlier cohorts. Instructors encouraged and engaged their students; student agreed that the learning environments supported diversity. Students gained significantly in core computer science content (i.e., abstraction and algorithms) as well as computational thinking practices. Female students showed robust gains on a number of indicators (including higher course grades than males); under-represented minority students showed positive gains in content knowledge. The majority of students said they were likely or possibly likely to pursue computer science in college, and that taking CS Principles impacted their decisions.","PeriodicalId":344382,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 2017 ACM SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education","volume":"151 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-03-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115092190","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
There is growing momentum to integrate computer science (CS) education across K-12, but there is little information about how this integration should take place (Grover & Pea, 2013). This is especially true in the elementary grades, as fewer studies have examined computing at these grades. Through a National Science Foundation STEM+C project, we are developing and studying learning progressions for integrated CS and mathematics at the elementary level. Our research examines how teachers are introducing CS concepts within mathematic as well as what computational concepts and practices naturally can be taught within the context of elementary mathematics. We are also examining how these emerging progressions align with the K-12 CS Framework and the new standards from the Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA). Future aims are to develop a coherent set of learning progressions related to areas such as debugging, sequencing, looping, conditionals, and decomposition within mathematics topics such as geometry, fractions, and arithmetic number stories. Our research lays the groundwork for the development of learning trajectories that will guide curriculum developers and practitioners to understand how to teach students across grades K-5 computing within the context of their mathematics instruction.
{"title":"Emerging Learning Progressions in K-5 Integrated Mathematics And Computer Science Lesson Plans (Abstract Only)","authors":"Maya Israel, T. Lash, G. Reese","doi":"10.1145/3017680.3022421","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3017680.3022421","url":null,"abstract":"There is growing momentum to integrate computer science (CS) education across K-12, but there is little information about how this integration should take place (Grover & Pea, 2013). This is especially true in the elementary grades, as fewer studies have examined computing at these grades. Through a National Science Foundation STEM+C project, we are developing and studying learning progressions for integrated CS and mathematics at the elementary level. Our research examines how teachers are introducing CS concepts within mathematic as well as what computational concepts and practices naturally can be taught within the context of elementary mathematics. We are also examining how these emerging progressions align with the K-12 CS Framework and the new standards from the Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA). Future aims are to develop a coherent set of learning progressions related to areas such as debugging, sequencing, looping, conditionals, and decomposition within mathematics topics such as geometry, fractions, and arithmetic number stories. Our research lays the groundwork for the development of learning trajectories that will guide curriculum developers and practitioners to understand how to teach students across grades K-5 computing within the context of their mathematics instruction.","PeriodicalId":344382,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 2017 ACM SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education","volume":"436 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-03-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116014008","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Visual programming environments have been effective educational resources but are typically limited to a single user at a time. Given the amount of collaboration in modern software development and the value of group projects for beginner programmers, providing collaboration capabilities could be invaluable for students using a block-based programming environment. Online collaboration support would not only allow students to more actively work together on projects but would also facilitate other educational activities such as tutoring and interactive demos. Moreover, providing robust collaboration utilities allows the programming environment to more closely reflect the team-based nature of large scale, real-world programming projects. Note that collaborative editing offers a number of additional benefits under the hood: the same underlying software code can easily provide detailed logging of student actions and the capability to replay them. That is, researchers will be able to study how students solve problems and not just the end result. To this end, we have extended the Snap! visual programming environment to support real-time collaboration similar to Google Docs. In our model of collaboration, sprites and scripts can be edited by multiple users simultaneously, but the execution of the programs on the stage remains local. But is this the best collaboration model for students? If not, what alternative model would be better? Should the entire programming environment be synchronized across collaborators? Would simple screen sharing be more effective? Finally, how can we leverage a real-time collaborative environment to promote teamwork on programming projects?
{"title":"Bringing Real-Time Collaboration to Visual Programming (Abstract Only)","authors":"B. Broll, Á. Lédeczi","doi":"10.1145/3017680.3022387","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3017680.3022387","url":null,"abstract":"Visual programming environments have been effective educational resources but are typically limited to a single user at a time. Given the amount of collaboration in modern software development and the value of group projects for beginner programmers, providing collaboration capabilities could be invaluable for students using a block-based programming environment. Online collaboration support would not only allow students to more actively work together on projects but would also facilitate other educational activities such as tutoring and interactive demos. Moreover, providing robust collaboration utilities allows the programming environment to more closely reflect the team-based nature of large scale, real-world programming projects. Note that collaborative editing offers a number of additional benefits under the hood: the same underlying software code can easily provide detailed logging of student actions and the capability to replay them. That is, researchers will be able to study how students solve problems and not just the end result. To this end, we have extended the Snap! visual programming environment to support real-time collaboration similar to Google Docs. In our model of collaboration, sprites and scripts can be edited by multiple users simultaneously, but the execution of the programs on the stage remains local. But is this the best collaboration model for students? If not, what alternative model would be better? Should the entire programming environment be synchronized across collaborators? Would simple screen sharing be more effective? Finally, how can we leverage a real-time collaborative environment to promote teamwork on programming projects?","PeriodicalId":344382,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 2017 ACM SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education","volume":"18 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-03-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122438313","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Ashish Aggarwal, Christina Gardner-Mccune, D. Touretzky
Researchers and educators have designed curricula and resources for introductory programming environments such as Scratch, App Inventor, and Kodu to foster computational thinking in K-12. This paper is an empirical study of the effectiveness and usefulness of tiles and flashcards developed for Microsoft Kodu Game Lab to support students in learning how to program and develop games. In particular, we investigated the impact of physical manipulatives on 3rd -- 5th grade students' ability to understand, recognize, construct, and use game programming design patterns. We found that the students who used physical manipulatives performed well in rule construction, whereas the students who engaged more with the rule editor of the programming environment had better mental simulation of the rules and understanding of the concepts.
{"title":"Evaluating the Effect of Using Physical Manipulatives to Foster Computational Thinking in Elementary School","authors":"Ashish Aggarwal, Christina Gardner-Mccune, D. Touretzky","doi":"10.1145/3017680.3017791","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3017680.3017791","url":null,"abstract":"Researchers and educators have designed curricula and resources for introductory programming environments such as Scratch, App Inventor, and Kodu to foster computational thinking in K-12. This paper is an empirical study of the effectiveness and usefulness of tiles and flashcards developed for Microsoft Kodu Game Lab to support students in learning how to program and develop games. In particular, we investigated the impact of physical manipulatives on 3rd -- 5th grade students' ability to understand, recognize, construct, and use game programming design patterns. We found that the students who used physical manipulatives performed well in rule construction, whereas the students who engaged more with the rule editor of the programming environment had better mental simulation of the rules and understanding of the concepts.","PeriodicalId":344382,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 2017 ACM SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education","volume":"14 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-03-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122950520","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
NetsBlox is a new collaborative learning environment extending Snap! with a few carefully selected abstractions that enable students to create distributed applications. In today's interconnected world, it will become increasingly important to have a basic understanding of computer networking and distributed computation yet these topics are rarely covered in K-12 curricula. Conversely, NetsBlox makes distributed programming accessible to beginner programmers using its simple yet powerful visual programming primitives, an intuitive user interface and a sophisticated cloud-based infrastructure. Moreover, the tool enables students to work together on the same project from different computers similarly to how Google Docs operate. This feature enables online collaboration and facilitates new ways to teach and learn programming. By allowing students to create multi-player games, NetsBlox provides increased motivation and is likely to prove engaging to students. By providing access to online public domain data sources, such as weather, earthquake, and air pollution data, in a unified manner, students will be able to create interesting science projects in a number of STEM fields promoting interdisciplinary learning. This technology demonstration will introduce the environment and demonstrate its utility in creating multi-player games, such as Battleship and Tic Tac Toe, as well as highlight two client-server applications that display weather and historical earthquake data, respectively, on top of an interactive Google Maps background. Audience members will be asked to participate in a massively parallel volunteer computing application doing prime factorization of large numbers. The open source public domain NetsBlox environment is accessible at http://netsblox.org.
{"title":"Distributed Programming with NetsBlox is a Snap! (Abstract Only)","authors":"B. Broll, Á. Lédeczi","doi":"10.1145/3017680.3022379","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3017680.3022379","url":null,"abstract":"NetsBlox is a new collaborative learning environment extending Snap! with a few carefully selected abstractions that enable students to create distributed applications. In today's interconnected world, it will become increasingly important to have a basic understanding of computer networking and distributed computation yet these topics are rarely covered in K-12 curricula. Conversely, NetsBlox makes distributed programming accessible to beginner programmers using its simple yet powerful visual programming primitives, an intuitive user interface and a sophisticated cloud-based infrastructure. Moreover, the tool enables students to work together on the same project from different computers similarly to how Google Docs operate. This feature enables online collaboration and facilitates new ways to teach and learn programming. By allowing students to create multi-player games, NetsBlox provides increased motivation and is likely to prove engaging to students. By providing access to online public domain data sources, such as weather, earthquake, and air pollution data, in a unified manner, students will be able to create interesting science projects in a number of STEM fields promoting interdisciplinary learning. This technology demonstration will introduce the environment and demonstrate its utility in creating multi-player games, such as Battleship and Tic Tac Toe, as well as highlight two client-server applications that display weather and historical earthquake data, respectively, on top of an interactive Google Maps background. Audience members will be asked to participate in a massively parallel volunteer computing application doing prime factorization of large numbers. The open source public domain NetsBlox environment is accessible at http://netsblox.org.","PeriodicalId":344382,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 2017 ACM SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education","volume":"26 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-03-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123002132","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
A. Hansen, Hilary A. Dwyer, Ashley Iveland, Mia Talesfore, Lacy Wright, Danielle B. Harlow, Diana Franklin
We developed the Draw-A-Computer-Scientist-Test (DACST) to better understand elementary school students' conceptions of computer scientists and the nature of their work. By understanding how young children perceive computer scientists, we can broaden their ideas about the activities and images of computer scientists. We administered the DACST to 87 fourth-grade students (ages 8-9) as a pre- and post-assessment to a computer science curriculum. All students attended the same school and were taught by the same female teacher. Before the curriculum, we found that students most often drew male computer scientists working alone, and featured actions that were connected to technology in general (e.g., typing, printing), but not specific to computer science. After the curriculum, more female students drew female computer scientists than before, and the featured actions were more specific to computer science (e.g., programming a game). We also share insights about the classroom-learning environment that may have contributed to changes in students' understanding of computer scientists and their work.
{"title":"Assessing Children's Understanding of the Work of Computer Scientists: The Draw-a-Computer-Scientist Test","authors":"A. Hansen, Hilary A. Dwyer, Ashley Iveland, Mia Talesfore, Lacy Wright, Danielle B. Harlow, Diana Franklin","doi":"10.1145/3017680.3017769","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3017680.3017769","url":null,"abstract":"We developed the Draw-A-Computer-Scientist-Test (DACST) to better understand elementary school students' conceptions of computer scientists and the nature of their work. By understanding how young children perceive computer scientists, we can broaden their ideas about the activities and images of computer scientists. We administered the DACST to 87 fourth-grade students (ages 8-9) as a pre- and post-assessment to a computer science curriculum. All students attended the same school and were taught by the same female teacher. Before the curriculum, we found that students most often drew male computer scientists working alone, and featured actions that were connected to technology in general (e.g., typing, printing), but not specific to computer science. After the curriculum, more female students drew female computer scientists than before, and the featured actions were more specific to computer science (e.g., programming a game). We also share insights about the classroom-learning environment that may have contributed to changes in students' understanding of computer scientists and their work.","PeriodicalId":344382,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 2017 ACM SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education","volume":"31 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-03-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128501955","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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