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Publications (267)
Qualitative analysis is critical to understanding human datasets in many social science disciplines. Open coding is an inductive qualitative process that identifies and interprets "open codes" from datasets. Yet, meeting methodological expectations (such as "as exhaustive as possible") can be challenging. While many machine learning (ML)/generative...
Increasing access to computational ideas and practices is one important reason to integrate computational thinking (CT) in science classrooms. While integrating CT into science classrooms broadens exposure to computing, it may not be enough to ensure equitable participation in the science classroom. Equitable participation is crucial because provid...
Inductive qualitative methods have been a mainstay of education research for decades, yet it takes much time and effort to conduct rigorously. Recent advances in artificial intelligence, particularly with generative AI (GAI), have led to initial success in generating inductive coding results. Like human coders, GAI tools rely on instructions to wor...
Integrating computational thinking (CT) into math and science courses for the K-12 students will enhance technological and computational literacies and prepare the future STEM workforce. Though the positive outcome of CT integration is evident, one issue is teachers struggle to implement CT. This paper discusses how researchers guided teachers to l...
Science educators are integrating more and more computational thinking (CT) activities into their curricula. Proponents of CT offer two motivations: familiarizing students with a realistic depiction of the computational nature of modern scientific practices and encouraging more students from underrepresented backgrounds to pursue careers in science...
We present a macroeconomic agent-based model that incorporates land to constrain maximum agricultural production. The model contains three types of agents: firms, households, and land plots. Firms employ households to produce consumer goods which household then buy from firms. The maximum production of firms is limited by the area of land available...
Building on Papert (1980)'s idea of children talking to computers, we propose ChatLogo, a hybrid natural-programming language interface for agent-based modeling and programming. We build upon previous efforts to scaffold ABM & P learning and recent development in leveraging large language models (LLMs) to support the learning of computational progr...
This qualitative study (N=8) reports on high school STEM teachers' perceptions of the contribution of computational thinking (CT) to their classrooms. The participants were part of a four-week professional development program, namely [DETRACTED], in which they—together with educational researchers and computational experts—co-designed curricular un...
American Educational Research Association (AERA) annual meeting
Our objective is to improve local decision-making for strategies to end the HIV epidemic using the newly developed Levers of HIV agent-based model (ABM). Agent-based models use computer simulations that incorporate heterogeneity in individual behaviors and interactions, allow emergence of systemic behaviors, and extrapolate into the future. The Lev...
One way to help develop foundational computational literacy skills for K-12 students is to integrate computational thinking (CT) into science and math, but teachers have struggled to implement CT. This work investigates secondary science and math teachers' CT outcomes as they engaged in a four-week summer institute. This study uses conjecture mappi...
Science education communities understand the importance of computational
thinking but lack empirically tested learning materials. We report the implementation of a
computationally driven natural selection unit in an A.P. high school biology classroom.
Epistemic network analyses of student responses indicate that computational tools can facilitate l...
The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted a need for students to learn about public health issues, including the transmission of disease and methods for the prevention of epidemics. This study presents data from a project focused on developing an emergent systems microworld to help middle school students learn about these topics. The microworld is desi...
COVID-19 has brought increased attention to the importance of health literacy, including understanding of the transmission and prevention of disease. This study presents data from a project aimed at developing a computational modeling microworld to help middle school students learn about these topics. Specifically, the microworld is meant to help s...
Computational thinking (CT) is a key practice in the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS Lead States, 2013) that high school inservice teachers struggle to teach alongside disciplinary content in their classrooms. They often require training on how computing intersects with traditional science content and how to use computational tools that fos...
Preventing adverse health outcomes is complex due to the multi-level contexts and social systems in which these phenomena occur. To capture both the systemic effects, local determinants, and individual-level risks and protective factors simultaneously, the prevention field has called for adoption of system science methods in general and agent-based...
This paper reports on the first iteration of the Computational Thinking Summer Institute, a month‐long programme in which high school teachers co‐designed computationally enhanced mathematics and science curricula with researchers. The co‐design process itself was a constructionist learning experience for teachers resulting in constructionist curri...
A main argument for the integration of CT into science classrooms is that of authenticity–
that science should engage students in real science, which is becoming increasingly
computationally dependent. While many efforts have been made to design new curricula to
incorporate authentic learning experiences by integrating CT into STEM classrooms, litt...
This paper reports on high school STEM teachers' perceptions of the contribution of CT to their classrooms following CTSI. The current research, which is based on a qualitative analysis of the participating teachers' exit interviews, aims to answer the following research question: What are STEM teachers' perceptions of the contribution of CT to tea...
Computational Thinking (CT) curricula are increasingly being integrated into K-12 education across multiple subject areas. Our approach to this integration is to define Computational Thinking in terms of prevalent practices of professional disciplines. As our understanding of these practices evolve, so too must our operational definition of CT. Her...
To support student learning of Computational Thinking (CT) in disciplinary contexts, it is important that teachers have agency and ownership in the design process of creating curricula. We conducted a 4-week-long summer institute for teachers to co-design CT-integrated high school science units. Our approach to CT integration into Science and Mathe...
One approach to expanding computational thinking (CT) in K-12 education is for mathematics and science teachers to integrate CT into their curriculum. However, teachers must first engage with computational practices themselves and gain confidence in their ability to teach CT to their students. To this end, we developed a four-week professional deve...
High-fidelity models are increasingly used to predict, and guide decision making. Prior work has emphasized the importance of replication in ensuring reliable modeling, and has yielded important replication strategies. However, this work is based on relatively simple theory generating models, and its lessons might not translate to high-fidelity mod...
This work aims to help high school STEM teachers integrate computational thinking (CT) into their classrooms by engaging teachers as curriculum co-designers. K-12 teachers who are not trained in computer science may not see the value of CT in STEM classrooms and how to engage their students in computational practices that reflect the practices of S...
There is broad belief that preparing all students in preK-12 for a future in STEM involves integrating computing and CT tools and practices. Through creating and examining rich learning environments that integrate “STEM+C”, researchers are defining what CT means in STEM disciplinary settings. This interactive session brings together a diverse spect...
Teachers in K-12 science classrooms play a key role in helping their students engage in computational thinking (CT) activities that reflect authentic science practices. However, we know less about how to support teachers in integrating CT into their classrooms. This paper presents a case of one science teacher over three years as she participated i...
In the decades since Papert published Mindstorms (1980), computation has transformed nearly every branch of scientific practice. Accordingly, there is increasing recognition that computation and computational thinking (CT) must be a core part of STEM education in a broad range of subjects. Previous work has demonstrated the efficacy of incorporatin...
Code-first learning entails the use of computer code to learn a concept, and creating computational models is one such effective method for learning about scientific phenomena. Many code-first learning approaches employ the visual block-based programming paradigm in order to be accessible to school children with no prior programming experience, pro...
This paper introduces constructivist dialogue mapping (CDM), a new type of concept mapping. CDM encodes what people learn during a non-goal directed learning activity. CDM is a practical means to outline the mini theories users fluidly construct as they explore open-ended learning environments. To demonstrate the method, in this paper we use CDM to...
Despite STEM education communities recognizing the importance of integrating computational thinking (CT) into high school curricula, computation still remains a separate area of study in K-12 contexts. In addition, much of the research on CT has focused on creating generally agreed-upon definitions and curricula, but few studies have empirically te...
The last ten years have seen a proliferation of introductory programming environments for younger learners. Increasingly, these environments are moving into the “cloud” where they can be accessed through web browsers and run on a variety of devices including tablets and smartphones. The shift to online settings enables a variety of powerful pedagog...
The importance of computational thinking (CT) as a goal of science education is increasingly acknowledged. The representational affordances of computational tools are changing the way knowledge can be constructed, expressed, and understood across disciplines. Our group has worked to explicitly characterize CT practices used by computational STEM re...
This paper describes visitor interaction with an interactive tabletop game on the topic of evolutionary adaptations of social insects that we designed in collaboration with a large American museum. We observed visitors playing the game and talked to them about the experience. The game explores the emergent phenomena of ant behavior. Research has sh...
National and state educational initiatives are increasingly prioritizing computer science and computational thinking as valued sets of skills and practices. However, despite ongoing efforts to broaden participation in computing, the field faces increasing underrepresentation of women and other racial and ethnic groups. In this paper, we argue that...
For many years, beginning computer science students have been asked the seemingly simple question: what makes one algorithm better than another? Usually, this concept of "best-ness" is introduced with the many algorithms that are used to sort data. Thus, students are overwhelmed by the intricacies of sorting while simultaneously trying to understan...
Implementation science has great potential to improve the health of communities and individuals who are not achieving health equity. However, implementation science can exacerbate health disparities if its use is biased toward entities that already have the highest capacities for delivering evidence-based interventions. In this article, we examine...
This paper describes visitor interaction with an interactive tabletop game on the topic of evolutionary adaptations of social insects that we designed in collaboration with a large Midwestern museum. Our exhibit, called Ant Adaptations, takes the form of an agent-based modeling game (ABMG) that integrates complex system learning with gameplay. We v...
This research paper presents a design-based research study centring on a constructionist curricular unit, called Mind the Gap (MTG), which was designed to help high school students learn about a complex and controversial social issue in the United States—wealth inequality. The four-day-long unit was implemented in eight economics classes with a tot...
We propose agent-based construction (a-b-c) interviews as a new research methodology specifically designed to expose patterns of reasoning about emergent phenomena and complex systems. In an a-b-c interview, the researcher acts as an active mediator between the participant and an agent-based modeling environment. As the participant describes the mo...
We present a method of endowing agents in an agent-based model (ABM) with sophisticated cognitive capabilities and a naturally tunable level of intelligence. Often, ABMs use random behavior or greedy algorithms for maximizing objectives (such as a predator always chasing after the closest prey). However, random behavior is too simplistic in many ci...
We present a method of endowing agents in an agent-based model (ABM) with sophisticated cognitive capabilities and a naturally tunable level of intelligence. Often, ABMs use random behavior or greedy algorithms for maximizing objectives (such as a predator always chasing after the closest prey). However, random behavior is too simplistic in many ci...
Mind the Gap (MTG) is a curricular unit revolving around a series of three agent-based participatory simulations (ABPSs). The goal of the MTG curricular unit is to help high school students understand important mechanisms of wealth inequality in the U.S., through the lens of complex systems with NetLogo HubNet-based participatory activities.
ABPSs...
This HubNet model is the second model of the MTG series. Mind the Gap (MTG) is a curricular unit revolving around a series of three agent-based participatory simulations (ABPSs). The goal of the MTG curricular unit is to help high school students understand important mechanisms of wealth inequality in the U.S. through the lens of complex systems wi...
This HubNet model is the third model of the MTG series. Mind the Gap (MTG) is a curricular unit revolving around a series of three agent-based participatory simulations (ABPSs). The goal of the MTG curricular unit is to help high school students understand important mechanisms of wealth inequality in the U.S. through the lens of complex systems wit...
In this paper we propose that educational game design should work to create games as objects-to-think-with—games that engage players in the exploration of and experimentation with personally interesting questions around domain-relevant representations. We argue this design focuses on developing tools and interactions that the player can use for inq...
There is growing diversity in the design of introductory programming environments. Where once all novices learned to program in conventional text-based languages, today, there exists a growing ecosystem of approaches to programming including graphical, tangible, and scaffolded text environments. To date, relatively little work has explored the rela...
The purpose of this work is to understand the learning affordances of two different types of simulation-based activities through a quasi-experimental comparative study. We created two versions of a curricular unit—one as a participatory simulation activity (PartSim), the other as a model-based inquiry activity with an agent-based model (ABM). We im...
Extensive research has shown that one of the benefits of programming to learn about scientific phenomena is that it facilitates learning about mechanisms underlying the phenomenon. However, using programming activities in classrooms is associated with costs such as requiring additional time to learn to program or students needing prior experience w...
Rate-based processes comprise an important set of scientific phenomena, as well as an important part of the K12 science curricula. Electric current is one such phenomenon, which is taught in various forms from 4th - 12th grades. Research shows that students at all levels find electricity difficult to understand, and the difficulties persist even af...
There is a great deal of overlap between the set of practices collected under the term “computational thinking” and the mathematical habits of mind that are the focus of much mathematics instruction. Despite this overlap, the links between these two desirable educational outcomes are rarely made explicit, either in classrooms or in the literature....
Using agent-based modeling, we generalize Hotelling's model of spatial competition with more than two firms in a two-dimensional space. Firms choose both price and location to maximize profits. The principle of minimum diffferentiation does not hold in general. Local duopolies emerge from the interaction between firms. Firms do not spread uniformly...
Multi-agent modeling is a computational approach to model behavior of complex systems in terms of simple micro level agent rules that result in macro level patterns and regularities. It has been argued that complex systems approaches provide distinct advantages over traditional equation-based mathematical modeling approaches in the process of scien...
The number of students taking high school computer science classes is growing. Increasingly, these students are learning with graphical, block-based programming environments either in place of or prior to traditional text-based programming languages. Despite their growing use in formal settings, relatively little empirical work has been done to und...
In this paper we present an approach to learning design that leverages perspective taking to help students learn about complex systems. We define perspective taking as projecting one’s identity onto external entities (both animate and inanimate) to predict and anticipate events based on ecological cues; to automatically sense the affordances of obj...
The last ten years have seen a proliferation of introductory programming environments designed for learners across the K-12 spectrum. These environments include visual block-based tools, text-based languages designed for novices, and, increasingly, hybrid environments that blend features of block-based and text-based programming. This paper present...
Multi-agent modeling is a computational approach to model behavior of complex systems in terms of simple micro level agent rules that result in macro level patterns and regularities. It has been argued that complex systems approaches provide distinct advantages over traditional equation-based mathematical modeling approaches in the process of scien...
Research on the design of learning environments for K-12 science education has been informed by two bodies of literature: inquiry-based science and Constructionism. Inquiry-based science has emphasized engagement in activities that reflect authentic scientific practices. Constructionism has focused on designing intuitively accessible authoring envi...
This poster shows a preliminary analysis on log data generated from students’ interactions with a code-first learning environment. In such environments students learn about the mechanisms of target phenomena by programming the behavior of computational agents with code blocks. We characterize students’ programing practices by four measures we devel...
The ability to express ideas in a computationally meaningful way is becoming increasingly important in our technological world. In response to the growing importance of computational literacy skills, new intuitive and accessible programming environments are being designed. This paper presents a framework for classifying the ways that block-based in...
Computer science (CS) is becoming an increasingly diverse domain. This paper reports on an initiative designed to introduce underrepresented populations to computing using an eclectic, multifaceted approach. As part of a yearlong computing course, students engage in Maker activities, participatory simulations, and computing projects that foreground...
Complex systems are challenging for students, especially younger students, to learn. In this paper, we argue that agent-based models (ABMs) of social insects provide an engaging and effective space for students to learn powerful ideas about complex systems. We designed a curricular unit called BeeSmart centering on ABMs of honeybees’ collective beh...
This paper presents Frog Pond, an interactive code-first learning environment about biological evolution. We deployed Frog Pond as part of a six-day curricular unit on natural selection implemented in six 7th grade science classes. Here we describe a case study of two students, Charlie and Aaron who participated in the unit. Comparing pre- and post...
Being able to recognize the impossibility or the very weak probability of an outcome, such as winning the lottery, is an important challenge in probabilistic reasoning. We reproduce a classical Piagetian experiment using computer-based modeling to test if we can replicate Piaget and Inhelder's findings on the idea of "chance as the negotiation of m...
Children's understanding of chance has been one of the central interests of Piagetian research. Most existing studies on this topic use laboratory questions such as the marble tilt box problem or its variations. We propose to present a study on high school students' understanding of randomness within the context of working with computational models...