Jennifer Albert

BJC in action: Comparison of student perceptions of a computer science principles course

The Beauty and Joy of Computing (BJC) is a curriculum for the new AP Computer Science Principles course. Over the past 2 years, we have collected post-course surveys from 399 students participating in the BJC course. This paper investigates how the responses of females and students from underrepresented racial minority groups (URMs) differed from those of their counterparts. We found that female students had taken fewer CS courses prior to BJC but that students from URMs had taken more prior CS courses. Both groups were nearly equally likely to recommend the course to a friend, with about 80% recommending. We found no evidence to suggest that female students showed more or less interest in specific CS topics, such as learning how computing has changed the world or making mobile apps/games. Despite having taken more CS courses prior to BJC, we found that students from URMs were overall less likely to intend to take additional CS courses. Overall, our findings are fairly consistent with the literature, and suggest that BJC makes some progress towards broadening participation in computing.

Evolutionary Practice Problems Generation: Design Guidelines

This paper identifies design guidelines for the application of evolutionary techniques to the task of generating practice problems for learners in an Intelligent Tutoring System. To this end, we designed experiments that progressively incorporated an increasing number of the characteristics we expect to find in our target application. These features included noisy evaluations, overspecialization, and the need to mitigate user fatigue resulting from interactive evaluations of practice problems. As we did so, we evaluated the potential of recent breakthroughs in coevolutionary learning theory and identified the tradeoff specific to educational applications.

Evaluating Scratch Programs to Assess Computational Thinking in a Science Lesson (Abstract Only)

In this poster, we describe efforts to assess computational thinking activities that can be easily implemented in any science classroom. Studies have shown that a set of conditions must be met for computational thinking tools to be used in K-12 education and that when they are used, there is a wide spectrum in the level of computational thinking that the tool enables. This study extends this work by examining how middle school students translated their science fair projects into Scratch and what evidence of computational thinking is present. Scrape, a tool designed to analyze Scratch projects was used. Overall, it was found that most students simply created a presentation of their project without much complexity. Eight students created interactive projects that required user participation and used more advanced computational concepts. Finally, recommendations are given for next steps in the creation of a series of activities that would scaffold student learning as they apply to computational thinking concepts of a science concept.