Computer Science

Computer programming for young children has grown in popularity among both education researchers and product developers, but still relatively little is known about how to assess and track young children’s learning through coding. This study presents an assessment tool to track Kindergarten through second grade students’ learning after engaging in a programming curriculum. Researchers worked with N=57 Kindergarten through second grade students over seven weeks to implement a curriculum using ScratchJr to introduce concepts of sequencing to create animated stories, collages, and games.

The scarcity of efficient and user-friendly authoring tools has long been acknowledged as a limiting factor in the widespread development and deployment of intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs). Creating an effective authoring tool for domain experts poses two significant challenges: it must facilitate the creation of curricular content by domain experts who are typically neither ITS experts nor software engineers, and it must support the creation or modification of ITS-specific pedagogical strategies without exposing the complexity of the ITS itself to the domain expert.

A common way for students to develop scientific argumentation abilities is through argumentation about socioscientific issues, defined as scientific problems with social, ethical, and moral aspects. Computer-based scaffolding can support students in this process. In this mixed method study, we examined the use and impact of computer based scaffolding to support middle school students’ creation of evidence-based arguments during a 3-week problem-based learning unit focused on the water quality of a local river.

This paper employs meta-analysis to determine the influence of computer-based scaffolding characteristics and study and test scorequality on cognitive outcomes in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education at the secondary, college, graduate, and adult levels.

In this paper, we describe a pilot study of EarSketch, a computational remixing approach to introductory computer science, in a formal academic computing course at the high school level. The EarSketch project provides an integrated curriculum, Python API, digital audio workstation (DAW), audio loop library, and social sharing site. The goal for EarSketch is to broaden participation in computing, particularly by traditionally underrepresented groups, through a thickly authentic learning environment that has personal and industry relevance in both computational and artistic domains.