ITEST Resources

This document includes six checklists created by the Evaluation Resource Center for Advanced Technological Education (EvaluATE). These checklists may be used by researchers and evaluators to check for adherence to the National Science Foundation's Common Guidelines.

This document created by the Center for Innovative Research in Cyberlearning (CIRCL) provides background information on cyberlearning, answering what, why, and how.

This document created by the Center for Research in Cyberlearning (CIRCL) synthesizes the field of learning sciences and how it intersects with cyberlearning.

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

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

In this paper we lay out our strategy of our Scalable Game Design curriculum, which has been funded through a series of NSF (ITEST Strategy, CE21 Type II, and ITEST Scale Up) grants as well as the Google CS4HS program, and list some research questions relevant to bringing Computer Science education to middle schools.

Visual programming in 3D sounds much more appealing than programming in 2D, but what are its benefits? Here, University of Colorado Boulder educators discuss the differences between 2D and 3D regarding three concepts connecting computer graphics to computer science education: ownership, spatial thinking, and syntonicity.

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

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