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The Tablet Game: An Embedded Assessment for Measuring Students' Programming Skill in App Inventor (Abstract Only)

Published: 21 February 2018 Publication History

Abstract

Assessing students' learning of concepts in programming is an essential part of teaching computer science. We developed the Tablet Game, an embedded assessment that measures students' skill in identifying programming structures used to create various behaviors in MIT App Inventor. The assessment was implemented as an app for Android devices. Students conducted an activity in the app, and identified which code-blocks would create those behaviors. Students' responses were transmitted to our custom data-collection server. In two five-day app development summer camps held with middle school students, students completed the same Tablet Game assessment on day 1 and day 5. Students also completed pre/post surveys which gathered ethnographic data and asked about interest levels in computer science and prior programming experience. Using data from 44 students with pre/post assessments matched to surveys, our results indicated that (1) students with high self-reported prior experience in App Inventor outperformed students with low prior experience on the Tablet Game pre-test, indicating that the assessment measures programming skill and (2) students with low prior experience achieved equivalent results as the high prior experience cohort in the post-test, indicating that the camp was successful in imparting programming skills. Both of these results are statistically significant. Further, (3) there were no statistically significant differences in gender composition of the two experience cohorts, indicating that the camp was equally accessible to girls and boys.

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cover image ACM Conferences
SIGCSE '18: Proceedings of the 49th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education
February 2018
1174 pages
ISBN:9781450351034
DOI:10.1145/3159450
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 21 February 2018

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  1. app inventor
  2. embedded assessment
  3. programming

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SIGCSE '18
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SIGCSE '18 Paper Acceptance Rate 161 of 459 submissions, 35%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 1,595 of 4,542 submissions, 35%

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SIGCSE TS 2025
The 56th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education
February 26 - March 1, 2025
Pittsburgh , PA , USA

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