Making Educational Games That Work in The Classroom

Publications

The development of analytical skills is a central goal of the Next Generation Science Standards and foundational to subject mastery in STEM fields. Yet, significant barriers exist to students gaining such skills. Here we describe a new “gentleslope” cyberlearning strategy that gradually introduces students to the authoring of scientific simulations via a Web-based modding approach called CyberMOD. Modding involves adding agents with predefined functionality to a simulation world to produce a unique combination whose behavior can then be visualized by running the simulation. This permits low

Read More

Conversational Programming: Exploring Interactive Program Analysis

Publications

Our powerful computers help very little in debugging the program we have so we can change it into the program we want. We introduce Conversational Programming as a way to harness our computing power to inspect program meaning through a combination of partial program execution and semantic program annotation. A programmer in our approach interactively selects highly autonomous “agents” in a program world as conversation topics and then changes the world to explore the potential behaviors of a selected agent in different scenarios. In this way, the programmer proactively knows how their code

Read More

Early Validation of Computational Thinking Pattern Analysis

Publications

End-user game design affords teachers a unique opportunity to integrate computational thinking concepts into their classrooms. However, it is not always apparent in game and simulation projects what computational thinking-related skills students have acquired. Computational Thinking Pattern Analysis (CTPA) enables teachers to visualize which of nine specific skills students have mastered in game design that can then be used to create simulations. CTPA has the potential to automatically recognize and calculate student computational thinking skills, as well as to map students’ computational

Read More

Real Time Assessment of Computational Thinking

Publications

This paper suggests a Cyberlearning tool based on a highly innovative assessment methodology that helps teachers with computer science education. Currently, there is a strong push to integrate aspects of programming and coding into the classroom environment. However, few if any tools exist that enable real-time formative assessment of in-class programming tasks. The proposed REACT (Real Time Evaluation and Assessment of Computational Thinking) system is a first step toward allowing teachers to see which high-level concepts students have mastered and which ones they are struggling with as

Read More

The Consume-Create Spectrum: Balancing Convenience and Computational Thinking in STEM Learning

Publications

Future school science standards, such as the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), emphasize the integration of simulation and modeling activities in the classroom environment. The extremes of these activities have two vastly different implementations. On one hand, a teacher can have students experiment on a pre-made simulation associated with the material. On the other hand, students can use, for example, an end-user programming tool to create the simulation from scratch. This allows students to not only experiment on, but also, to model the real world phenomenon being studied, a key

Read More

Weaving Computing into All Middle School Disciplines

Publications

In order to get students interested in computing, we teach middle school teachers of different disciplines programming with Alice and work with them on integrating computing into their discipline. Alice provides an interface for novices to create animations easily and quickly, which is attractive to and fun for students. We have been developing Alice curriculum materials for integrating computing into middle school disciplines for six years. Although our target audience is middle school, our materials are used by teachers from elementary school to introductory college level. This paper

Read More

Using Flowchart Programming to Create Exergames

Publications

Exergaming activities demonstrate how technology could be used as an instrument to reduce the impact of this disease. One can purchase commercial, technology-based exergames such as Nintendo Wii Fit or Xbox Kinect games; however, the authors developed a custom exergame using Phoenix Contact’s Nanoline microcontroller and nano Navigator software flowchart. The beauty of the flowcharting software is that people who have no or little programming experience can easily understand its structure.

Read More

Scratch for Arduino: Exergaming Development

Publications

Currently, obesity has become one of the major health concerns in the United States. A way to relieve this problem is creating fitness activities using the technology and tools available at hand. “Punching Pad” is a prototype that utilizes Scratch for Arduino software and the Arduino Board to make this possible. This device is not only considered a viable fitness activity, but also it could help to inspire children to build other gadgets that, in fact, would facilitate the acquisition of programming skills and basic electronics concepts.

Read More

Looking for Learning in After-School Spaces

Publications

In this study we examined three after-school settings for 8 weeks focusing on storyboarding, chatting on a social network site, videotaped conversations with volunteer facilitators, presentations the youth made at the end of the program, and structured interviews with researchers to look for evidence of learning in afterschool spaces.

Read More