Resources included in these libraries were submitted by ITEST projects or STELAR and are relevant to the work of the NSF ITEST Program. PDFs and/or URLs to the original resource are included in the resource description whenever possible. In some cases, full text publications are located behind publishers’ paywalls and a fee or membership to the third party site may be required for access. Permission for use must be requested through the publisher or author listed in each entry.
The landscape of Block-based programming: Characteristics of block-based environments and how they support the transition to text-based programming
PublicationBlock-based programming (BBP) environments have become increasingly commonplace computer science education. Despite a rapidly expanding ecosystem of BBP environments, text-based languages remain the dominant programming paradigm, motivating the transition from BBP to text-based programming (TBP). Support students in transitioning from BBP to TBP is an important and open design question. This work identifies 101 unique BBP environments, analyzes the 46 of them and identifies different design approaches used to support the transition to TBP. The contribution of this work is to provide a snapshot
To block or not to block, that is the question: students' perceptions of blocks-based programming
PublicationBlocks-based programming tools are becoming increasingly common in high-school introductory computer science classes. Such contexts are quite different than the younger audience and informal settings where these tools are more often used. This paper reports findings from a study looking at how high school students view blocks-based programming tools, what they identify as contributing to the perceived ease-of-use of such tools, and what they see as the most salient differences between blocks-based and text-based programming. Students report that numerous factors contribute to making blocks
Latent value in humiliation: A design thinking tool to enhance empathy in creative ideation
PublicationDesign thinking emphasizes that in addition to being creative, design solutions should be empathetic. Yet, research suggests there may be a tension between these goals, where focusing on empathy comes at a cost to creativity, sometimes by inducing fixation. We investigated this phenomenon through a quasi-experimental design with novice designers, contrasting two structured ideation techniques in which participants (N = 47) generated bad ideas prior to proposing beneficial ideas. Specifically, they used the wrong theory protocol (WTP) to generate harmful and humiliating ideas, and a variant in
ITEST PI Meeting 2022 - Day 3, Welcome and NSF Town Hall
VideoITEST PI Meeting 2022 - Day 3, Keynote by Robert Simmons III and Closing Plenary
VideoITEST PI Meeting 2022 - Day 3, Session 2: Emerging Domains
VideoITEST PI Meeting 2022 - Day 3, Session 1: Scale Up Experiences, Successes, and Challenges
VideoNSF Program Officer & guest speaker moderated a panel discussion of seven ITEST Principal Investigators & Co-PIs as they shared successes and challenges in scaling their ITEST project work.
ITEST PI Meeting 2022 - Day 2, Session 3: Diversity, Inclusion, Equity, and Access (DIEA)
VideoITEST PI Meeting 2022 - Day 2, Reflections on Diversity, Inclusion, Equity, and Access (DIEA), Keynote Jeannine Dingus-Eason
VideoITEST PI Meeting 2022 - Day 1, Session 2: Technology Integration and Evidence of Learning
VideoNSF Program Officers invited four ITEST Principal Investigators, to share challenges, successes, and affordances as it related to their work, and posed questions for one another for the audience to consider.