Abstract
This paper analyzes students’ design solutions for an NGSS-aligned earth sciences curriculum, the Playground Design Challenge (PDC), for upper-elementary school (grade 5 and 6) students. We present the underlying computational model and the user interface for generating design solutions for a school playground that has to meet cost, water runoff, and accessibility constraints. We use data from the pretest and posttest assessments and activity logs collected from a pilot study run in an elementary school to evaluate the effectiveness of the curriculum and investigate the relations between students’ behaviors and their learning performances. The results show that (1) the students’ scores significantly increased from pretest to posttest on engineering design assessments, and (2) students’ solution-generation and testing behaviors were indicative of the quality of their design solutions as well as their pre-post learning gains. In the future, tracking such behaviors online will allow us to provide adaptive scaffolds that help students improve on their engineering design solutions.
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Notes
- 1.
Students did not program the computational model in this pilot study, however, we have added programming activities in NetsBlox for future studies.
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Acknowledgments
This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. DRL-1742195. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. We thank Ron Fried, Reina Fujii, Satabdi Basu, and James Hong for their work.
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Zhang, N., Biswas, G., Chiu, J.L., McElhaney, K.W. (2019). Analyzing Students’ Design Solutions in an NGSS-Aligned Earth Sciences Curriculum. In: Isotani, S., Millán, E., Ogan, A., Hastings, P., McLaren, B., Luckin, R. (eds) Artificial Intelligence in Education. AIED 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11625. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23204-7_44
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