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AMOEBA: Designing for collaboration in computer science classrooms through live learning analytics

  • Matthew Berland
  • Don Davis
  • Carmen Petrick Smith
Article
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Abstract

AMOEBA is a unique tool to support teachers’ orchestration of collaboration among novice programmers in a non-traditional programming environment. The AMOEBA tool was designed and utilized to facilitate collaboration in a classroom setting in real time among novice middle school and high school programmers utilizing the IPRO programming environment. AMOEBA’s key affordance is supporting teachers’ pairing decisions with real time analyses of students’ programming progressions. Teachers can track which students are working in similar ways; this is supported by real-time graphical log analyses of student activities within the programming environment. Pairing students with support from AMOEBA led to improvements in students’ program complexity and depth. Analyses of the data suggest that the data mining techniques utilized in and the metrics provided by AMOEBA can support instructors in orchestrating cooperation. The primary contributions of this paper are a set of design principles around and a working tool for fostering collaboration in computer science classes.

Keywords

Computer science education Learning analytics Classroom orchestration Constructionism 
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Notes

Acknowledgments

Thanks to the Complex Play Lab for helping refine this work. This work was supported by National Science Foundation Grant No. 1331655. The opinions expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of the NSF.

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© International Society of the Learning Sciences, Inc. 2015

Authors and Affiliations

  • Matthew Berland
    • 1
  • Don Davis
    • 2
  • Carmen Petrick Smith
    • 3
  1. 1.Department of Curriculum and InstructionUniversity of Wisconsin–MadisonMadisonUSA
  2. 2.Department of Interdisciplinary Learning & TeachingUniversity of Texas at San AntonioSan AntonioUSA
  3. 3.Department of EducationUniversity of VermontBurlingtonUSA

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