Abstract
We present a systems thinking approach to help middle school students learn about diffusion processes in liquids using CTSiM, an open-ended learning environment. Students model and analyze the collision of individual particles, and then scale up the process to understand diffusion as an emergent behavior of particles. A classroom study shows that the intervention helped students achieve significant learning gains. We also observed synergistic learning of domain knowledge and computational thinking skills. To understand students’ problem-solving processes, we used a sequence mining algorithm to discover frequent activity patterns and link them to learning.
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This work has been supported by NSF Cyberlearning Grant #1441542.
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Zhang, N., Biswas, G. (2018). Understanding Students’ Problem-Solving Strategies in a Synergistic Learning-by-Modeling Environment. In: Penstein Rosé, C., et al. Artificial Intelligence in Education. AIED 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10948. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93846-2_76
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