Fostering Collaborative Computer Science Learning with Intelligent Virtual Companions for Upper Elementary Students (Collaborative Research: Boyer)

There is growing recognition that children can, and should, learn computer science. One of the central tenets of computer science is that it is a collaborative discipline, yet children do not start out with an intrinsic ability to collaborate. The project will provide the opportunity for upper elementary students to learn computer science and build strong collaboration practices. Leveraging the promise of virtual learning companions, the project will address three thrusts. First, the project will collect datasets of collaborative learning for computer science in diverse upper elementary school classrooms. Second, the project will design, develop, and iteratively refine its intelligent virtual learning companions, which support dyads of students in a scaffolded computer science learning environment with an interactive online coding tool. Third, the project will generate research findings and evidence about how children collaborate in computer science learning, and how best to support their collaboration with intelligent virtual learning companions. There will be three families of deliverables: learning activities and professional development, an intelligent learning environment with virtual learning companions, and research evidence that furthers the state of scholarship and practice surrounding the collaborative learning of computer science. The project will situate itself in highly diverse elementary schools in two states, Durham County, North Carolina and Alachua County, Florida. This project is supported by the Discovery Research PreK-12 program, which funds research and development of STEM innovations and approaches.

The project addresses the research question, "How can we support upper elementary-school students in computer science learning and collaboration using intelligent virtual learning companions?" The initial dataset will provide a ground-truth measure of students' collaboration approaches to classroom computer science learning tasks through instrumenting computer labs in elementary schools for collecting dialogue and problem-solving activity. The project will collect triangulating qualitative data to better understand impactful classroom dynamics around dyadic learning of computer science. The technical innovation of the project is the way in which student dyads are supported: each pair of children within the elementary school classroom will interact with a dyad of state of-the-art intelligent virtual learning companions. These companions will enhance the classroom experience by adapting in real time to the students' patterns of collaboration and problem solving to provide tailored support specifically for that pair of students. The virtual learning companions will model crucial dimensions of healthy collaboration through their dialogue with one another, including self-explanation, question generation, attributing challenges to the task and not to deficits in each other, and establishing common ground through uptake of ideas. The project will compare outcomes of computer science learning as measured in two ways: individual pre-test to post-test, and quality of collaboratively produced solutions. The project team will measure collaborative practices through dialogue analysis for the target collaboration strategies, as well as interest and self-efficacy for computer science. The project will utilize a multilevel model design to study the effect of the virtual learning companions on student outcomes. Using speech, dialogue transcripts, code artifact analysis, and multimodal analysis of gesture and facial expression, the team will conduct sequential analyses that identify the virtual learning companion interactions that are particularly beneficial for students, and focus our development efforts on expanding and refining those interactions. They will also identify the affordances that students did not engage with and determine whether to eliminate or re-cast them. The analytics of collaborative process data will once again be augmented with qualitative classroom data from field notes, focus groups, and semi-structured interviews with students and teachers. The themes that emerge will guide subsequent refinement of the environment and learning activities.

Project-related Publications:

• Wiggins, J. B., Earle-Randell, T. V., Bounajim, D., Ma, Y., Ruiz, J. M., Liu, R., ... & Boyer, K. E. (2022, September). Building the dream team: children's reactions to virtual agents that model collaborative talk. In Proceedings of the 22nd ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (pp. 1-8).
• Vandenberg, J., Lynch, C., Boyer, K. E., & Wiebe, E. (2022). “I remember how to do it”: exploring upper elementary students’ collaborative regulation while pair programming using epistemic network analysis. Computer Science Education, 1-29.
• Ma, Y., Martinez Ruiz, J., Brown, T. D., Diaz, K. A., Gaweda, A. M., Celepkolu, M., Boyer, K. E., Lynch, C. F., & Wiebe, E. (2022, February). It's Challenging but Doable: Lessons Learned from a Remote Collaborative Coding Camp for Elementary Students. In Proceedings of the 53rd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education V. 1 (pp. 342-348).
• Vandenberg, J., Lynch, C., Boyer, K. E., & Wiebe, E. (2022). “I remember how to do it”: exploring upper elementary students’ collaborative regulation while pair programming using epistemic network analysis. Computer Science Education, 1-29.
• Vandenberg, J., Zakaria, Z., Tsan, J., Iwanski, A., Lynch, C., Boyer, K. E., & Wiebe, E. (2021). Prompting collaborative and exploratory discourse: An epistemic network analysis study. International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning, 16, 339–366. doi:10.1007/s11412-021-09349-3
• Zakaria, Z., Vandenberg, J., Tsan, J., Boulden, D. C., Wiggins, J., Boyer, K. E., Lynch, C., & Wiebe, E. (April, 2021). Designing Virtual Pedagogical Agents with a Participatory Design Approach. Paper presented at American Educational Research Association Conference
• Vandenberg, J., Tsan, J., Hinckle, M., Lynch, C., Boyer, K. E., & Wiebe, E. (2021, April). Discursive gender differences in upper elementary students’ pair programming. Paper presented at American Educational Research Association Conference.
• Vandenberg, J., Rachmatullah A., Lynch, C., Boyer, K. E ., Wiebe, E. N. (2021) Interaction Effects of Race and Gender in Elementary Computer Science Attitudes: A Validation and Cross-Sectional Study. International Journal of Child-Computer Interaction (IJCCI), vol. 29, no. 100293, 1-11.
• Zakaria, Z., Vandenberg, J., Tsan, J., Boulden, D. C., Lynch, C. F., Boyer, K. E., & Wiebe, E. N. (2021). Two-Computer Pair Programming: Exploring a Feedback Intervention to improve Collaborative Talk in Elementary Students. Computer Science Education, 1-28.
• Tsan, J., Vandenberg, J., Zakaria, Z., Boulden, D. C., Lynch, C., Wiebe, E., & Boyer, K. E. (2021, March). Collaborative Dialogue and Types of Conflict: An Analysis of Pair Programming Interactions between Upper Elementary Students. In Proceedings of the 52nd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (pp. 1184-1190).
• Zakaria, Z., Vandenberg, J., Tsan, J., Wiggins, J., Lynch, C. F., Boyer, K. E., and Wiebe, E. N., (2021, April). Designing Virtual Pedagogical Agents Following a Participatory Design Approach. Paper accepted for presentation at the annual virtual meeting of the American Educational Research Association (AERA).
• Zakaria, Z., Tsan, J., Vandenberg, J., Lynch, C., Wiebe, E., & Boyer, K. E. (2021) Identifying Productive Conflict During Upper Elementary Students' Collaborative Programming. Poster accepted for presentation at the Annual Meeting of the International Society of the Learning Sciences (ISLS).
• Ma, Y., Wiggins, J.,  Celepkolu, M., Boyer, K. E., Lynch, C., Wiebe, E. N. (2021) The Challenge of Noisy Classrooms: Speaker Detection During Elementary Students’ Collaborative Dialogue. Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED), pp. To appear.
• Vandenberg, J., Tsan, J, Zakaria, Z., Lynch, C., Boyer, K. E., & Wiebe, E (2021). The‌ ‌Foundations‌ ‌of‌ ‌Collaborative‌ ‌Programming‌ ‌by‌ ‌Elementary-aged‌ ‌Children‌. To appear.
• Vandenberg, J., Rachmatullah, A., Lynch, C., Boyer, K. E., & Wiebe, E. (June, 2021). The relationship of CS attitudes, perceptions of collaboration, and pair programming strategies on upper elementary students’ CS learning. Accepted paper at Annual Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education, Virtual.
• Tsan, J., Vandenberg, J., Zakaria, Z., Wiggins, J. B., Webber, A. R., Bradbury, A., Lynch, C., Wiebe, E., Boyer, K. E., (2020, March) A Comparison of Two Pair Programming Configurations for Upper Elementary Students. Proceedings of the 51st ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE ’20), Portland, OR (pp. 346-352).
• Vandenberg, J., Tsan, J., Boulden, D. C., Zakaria, Z., Lynch, C., Boyer, K. E., & Wiebe, E. (2020). Elementary Students' Understanding of CS Terms. ACM Transactions on Computing Education (TOCE), 20 (3). https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3386364
• Vandenberg, J., Tsan, J., Zakaria, Z., Boulden, D. C., Boyer, K. E., Lynch, C.,  & Wiebe, E. N. (2020, April). Elementary learners’ regulation in computer-supported collaborative learning environments. Paper accepted for presentation at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association (AERA), San Francisco, CA.
• Zakaria, Z., Vandenberg, J., Boulden, D. C., Tsan, J., Boyer, K. E., Lynch, C., & Wiebe, E. N. (2020, April). Feedback to improve collaboration in pair programming. Paper accepted for presentation at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association (AERA), San Francisco, CA.
• Wiggins, J. B., Wilkinson, J., Baigorria, L., Huang, Y., Boyer, K. E., Lynch, C., & Wiebe, E. (2019, June). From Doodles to Designs: Participatory Pedagogical Agent Design with Elementary Students. In Proceedings of the 18th ACM International Conference on Interaction Design and Children (pp. 642-647). ACM.
• Vandenberg, J., Boulden, D. C., Creager, J., Bradbury, A., Zakaria, Z., Tsan, J., Wiebe, E., Lynch, E., & Boyer, K. (2019, April). Elementary students’ understanding of computer science terminology. Roundtable presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Toronto, Canada.
• Zakaria, Z., Boulden, D. C., Vandenberg, J., Tsan, J., Lynch, E., & Wiebe, E. (2019, April). Elementary students’ collaborative practices in side-by-side programming. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Toronto, Canada.
• Zakaria, Z., Boulden, D., Tsan, J., Vandenberg, J., Lynch, C., Wiebe, E., and Boyer, K. (2019, June). Collaborative talk across two pair-programming configurations. Accepted paper at International Conference on Computer Supported Collaborative Learning, Lyon, France. 
• Bradbury, A, Wiebe, E, Vandenberg, J., Tsan, J., Lynch, C., Boyer, K. (2019). The interface design of a collaborative computer science learning environment for elementary aged students. In Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting. Seattle, USA.