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Moodoo the Tracker: Spatial Classroom Analytics for Characterising Teachers’ Pedagogical Approaches

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Abstract

Teachers’ spatial behaviours in the classroom can strongly influence students’ engagement, motivation and other behaviours that shape their learning. However, classroom teaching behaviour is ephemeral, and has largely remained opaque to computational analysis. Inspired by the notion of Spatial Pedagogy, this paper presents a system called ‘Moodoo’ that automatically tracks and models how teachers make use of the classroom space by analysing indoor positioning traces. We illustrate the potential of the system through an authentic study with seven teachers enacting three distinct learning designs with more than 200 undergraduate students in the context of science education. The system automatically extracts spatial metrics (e.g. teacher-student ratios, frequency of visits to students’ personal spaces, presence in classroom spaces of interest, index of dispersion and entropy), mapping from the teachers’ low-level positioning data to higher-order spatial constructs. We illustrate how these spatial metrics can be used to generate a deeper understanding of how the pedagogical commitments embedded in the learning design, and personal teaching strategies, are reflected in the ways teachers use the learning space to provide support to students.

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Acknowledgements

Roberto Martinez-Maldonado’s research is partly funded by Jacobs Foundation.

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An earlier, shorter version of this paper (Martinez-Maldonado et al., 2020a) is the foundation for this article, which has been significantly extended in light of feedback and insights from AIED 2020.

Moodoo is a fictional character (a skilled Aboriginal tracker) in the Australian film Rabbit-Proof Fence. Aboriginal trackers could find people and things by developing acute senses to notice seemingly minute details, such as the way a footprint has been made (Holíková, 2012).

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Martinez-Maldonado, R., Echeverria, V., Mangaroska, K. et al. Moodoo the Tracker: Spatial Classroom Analytics for Characterising Teachers’ Pedagogical Approaches. Int J Artif Intell Educ 32, 1025–1051 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40593-021-00276-w

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