Abstracts:Presents the 2019 subject/author index for this publication.

Abstracts:In recent years, many initiatives have aimed to develop basic computational thinking skills. Despite the popularity of online platforms for early programmers, we still lack detailed information to analyze how these skills are acquired. In the present study we analyzed clickstream data from 3,355 participants enrolled in several Computational Thinking workshops using Kodetu, an online platform with fine grained logging features. Participants used Kodetu's coding blocks to solve challenges of increasing difficulty while we gathered their clickstream in the platform. Here, we present our findings after evaluating these data in regards of participants' characteristics (age, sex, previous knowledge), similarity with previously submitted solutions, and degree of discrepancy from the optimal solution. To facilitate collaboration with other researchers in this area, we released our dataset under an open license. To the best of our knowledge, this is the largest Computational Thinking-related datasets publicly available.

Abstracts:Evaluation is an essential part of any software development process as it helps compare intended with actual outcomes and identify possible improvements. To do this, it is important to understand how users interact with the product. As interactions with the interdisciplinary product category of Serious Games can be multifaceted, pure text-logging of gameplay actions is not always sufficient to cover all aspects needed to satisfy researchers' needs, for instance how the user feels or what s/he thinks while carrying out a certain action. For this reason, studies evaluating serious games are increasingly applying multimodal methods in recent years. This makes it important to establish theoretical foundations considering the changing research landscape. This paper presents a theoretical framework for multimodal Serious Games evaluation based on a review of relevant research.

Abstracts:The key question we address is whether interactivity in a virtual environment (VE) impacts conceptual learning. We developed a Virtual Reality (VR) application to simulate a playground, in which children had to engage in tasks that required solving arithmetical fractions problems. Fifty (50) children were tested in an empirical study with different conditions that varied the levels of interactivity and immersion, from a fully interactive to a non-immersive and non-interactive activity with LEGOs. A methodological framework, where quantitative and qualitative analyses complement each other, was developed to analyze children's activity. Our findings from the quantitative analysis showed that participants in the VEs seemed to have a greater overall gain than those that did not perform the activity in VR but did not clarify whether interactivity in the VE was the defining factor in this gain. The qualitative analysis indicated that it was the “passive” VR condition which provided evidence of sustained conceptual change. With countless educational VR applications becoming available nowadays to the public due to VR's recent resurgence in prominence through inexpensive headsets, the study of the effect of VE attributes, such as interactivity, is timely.

Abstracts:A room-scale virtual reality (VR) configuration allows users to physically walk within an interactive area while reflecting their real-world motion in the virtual environment. Room-scale VR provides developers of serious games and virtual simulations the opportunity to develop more realistic applications that are highly interactive and engaging. Despite these benefits, room-scale VR hardware is generally more expensive due to motion tracking and headset costs, also requiring a potentially large open physical space for the player to walk around in. Here we provide a quantitative and qualitative comparison between the usability, performance, and engagement of traditional seated VR with a room-scale variation within the scope of a medical-based epidural preparation serious game. This is a first-step in examining the differences between the two configurations and determining whether the additional requirements and resources associated with a room-scale VR configuration are warranted. Although our quantitative results reveal limited differences, the room scale VR configuration led to higher immersion. Our qualitative results indicate that the hardware being used and the requirements imposed upon it by the desired fidelity of the simulation must be carefully considered; higher fidelity implies greater computational requirements that may not be readily available to the average computer user.

Abstracts:In this work, we study students' learning effectiveness through their use of a homegrown innovative educational technology, Web Programming Grading Assistant (WPGA), which facilitates grading and feedback delivery of paper-based assessments. We designed a lab study and a classroom study from a lower-division blended-instruction computer science course. We evaluated a partial credit assignment algorithm. We tracked and modeled students' learning behaviors through their use of WPGA. Results showed that students demonstrated an effort and desire to review assessments regardless of if they were graded for academic performance or for attendance. Diligent students achieved higher exam scores on average and were found to review their exams and the correct questions frequently. Additionally, student cohorts exhibited similar initial reviewing patterns, but different in-depth reviewing and reflecting strategies. Ultimately, the work contributes to multidimensional learning analytics aggregation across the physical and cybersphere.

Abstracts:With the introduction of computer programming in schools around the world, a myriad of guides are being published to support educators who are teaching this subject, often for the first time. Most of these books offer a learning path based on the experience of the experts who author them. In this paper we propose and investigate an alternative way of determining the most suitable learning paths by analyzing projects developed by learners hosted in public repositories. Therefore, we downloaded 250 projects of different types from the Scratch online platform, and identified the differences and clustered them based on a quantitative measure, the computational thinking score provided by Dr. Scratch. We then triangulated the results by qualitatively studying in detail the source code of the prototypical projects to explain the progression required to move from one cluster to the next one. The result is a data-driven itinerary that can support teachers and policy makers in the creation of a curriculum for learning to program. Aiming to generalize this approach, we discuss a potential recommender tool, populated with data from public repositories, to allow educators and learners creating their own learning paths, contributing thus to a personalized learning connected with students' interests.

Abstracts:As computing becomes pervasive across fields, introductory computing curricula needs new tools to motivate and educate the influx of learners with little prior background and divergent goals. We seek to improve curricula by enriching it with authentic, real-world contexts and powerful scaffolds that can guide learners to success using automated tools, thereby reducing the strain on limited human instructional resources. To address these issues, we have created the BlockPy programming environment, a web-based, open-access, open-source platform for introductory computing students (https://www.blockpy.com). BlockPy has an embedded data science context that allows learners to connect the educational content with real-world scenarios through meaningful problems. The environment is block-based and gives guiding feedback to learners as they complete problems, but also mediates transfer to more sophisticated programming environments by supporting bidirectional, seamless transitions between block and text programming. Although it can be used as a stand-alone application, the environment has first-class support for the latest Learning Tools Interoperability standards, so that instructors can embed the environment directly within their Learning Management System. In this paper, we describe interesting design issues that we encountered during the development of BlockPy, an evaluation of the environment from fine-grained logs, and our future plans for the environment.

Abstracts:The papers in this special section examines new technologies for educational computing applications. Educational computing encompasses the full range of uses of computers pursuant to conducting the profession of educators. History of educational computing is scattered of innovations and discoveries pertaining both technical matters and learning sciences, which all contributed at shaping the way education is delivered today. In some cases, revolutionary technologies with a disruptive potential have been introduced, which brought immediate changes to common education practice, such as with distance and ubiquitous learning, massive online open courses, etc. In other cases, developments in the field have been the result of rediscovery of methods presented years before, as it is happening today, for instance, with virtual and augmented reality applications. Lastly, there are cases in which new approaches to educational computing derive from an evolution of existing solutions, which are sometimes applied for the first time to education, e.g., in reaction to changes in the society. An example is represented by gamification, which indeed has been made possible by achievements in the field of mobile computing, but also responds to the changed habits of a generation of learners who has grown up playing video games.

Abstracts:When a disaster occurs, video communication is an effective way to disseminate large quantities of important information. However, video coding standards such as High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) compress entire videos, whatever the contents are; at low bit rates, the quality of significant objects deteriorates. In this paper, an object-based video coding method is proposed to address this problem. The proposed method extracts objects on the basis of visual saliency and temporal correlation between frames. Subsequently, we execute pre-processing which degrades the background quality before encoding the video with HEVC. This method can reduce the bit rate while preserving target object quality. Experimental comparison with HEVC demonstrates the superior performance of the proposed method.