Blogs (4) >>
Fri 22 Mar 2024 15:45 - 16:10 at Meeting Room D136 - Visual Approaches Chair(s): Joel Adams

Computational thinking (CT) and problem-solving skills are increasingly integrated into K-8 school curricula worldwide. Consequently, there is a growing need to develop reliable assessments for measuring students’ proficiency in these skills. Recent works have proposed tests for assessing these skills across various CT concepts and practices, in particular, based on multi-choice items enabling psychometric validation and usage in large-scale studies. Despite their practical relevance, these tests are limited in how they measure students’ computational creativity, a crucial ability when applying CT and problem solving in real-world settings. In our work, we have developed ACE, a novel test focusing on the three higher cognitive levels in Bloom’s Taxonomy, i.e., Analyzing, Evaluating, and Creating. ACE comprises a diverse set of 7x3 multi-choice items spanning these three levels, grounded in elementary block-based visual programming. We evaluate the psychometric properties of ACE through a study conducted with 371 students in grades 3–7 from 10 schools. Based on several psychometric analysis frameworks, our results confirm the reliability and validity of ACE. Moreover, our study shows that students’ performance on ACE positively correlates with their performance in solving programming tasks on the Hour of Code: Maze Challenge by Code.org. The design and validation of ACE provide a basis for further development of tests incorporating aspects of computational creativity.

Fri 22 Mar

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15:45 - 17:00
Visual ApproachesPapers at Meeting Room D136
Chair(s): Joel Adams Calvin University
15:45
25m
Talk
Analyzing-Evaluating-Creating: Assessing Computational Thinking and Problem Solving in Visual Programming DomainsGlobal
Papers
Ahana Ghosh Max Planck Institute for Software Systems, Liina Malva Max Planck Institute for Software Systems, Adish Singla Max Planck Institute for Software Systems
DOI
16:10
25m
Talk
Recursion in Secondary Computer Science Education: A Comparative Study of Visual Programming ApproachesGlobal
Papers
Sverrir Thorgeirsson ETH Zurich, Lennart Lais ETH Zürich, Theo B. Weidmann ETH Zurich, Zhendong Su ETH Zurich
DOI
16:35
25m
Talk
Visual CryptoED: A Role-Playing and Visualization Tool for K-12 Cryptography Education
Papers
Pranathi Rayavaram University of Massachusetts Lowell, Sahithi Charitha Dindukuri University of Massachusetts Lowell, Krishna Vellamchety Univeristy of Massachusetts Lowell, Justin Marwad University of Massachusetts Lowell, Maryam Abbasalizadeh University of Massachusetts Lowell, Claire Seungeun Lee University of Massachusetts Lowell, Sashank Narain University of Massachusetts Lowell
DOI