Student engagement with interactive simulations is affected by the prompts and activities teachers choose to couple with such simulations. In this early work, we introduce a prototype dashboard to visualize and evaluate student engagement generated by activities that leverage interactive simulations. Engagement in this study is gauged by factors such as the time spent in the activity, the rate and pattern of clicks, and the simulation elements used by students. The dashboard employs several approaches to visualize student mouse activity data, displaying either individual student interactions or aggregated information of an entire group. To test the dashboard's usability, we evaluate student engagement resulting from a homework activity that focused on factors that affect stored energy in a capacitor and used the PhET simulation "Capacitor Lab: Basics". The results show that the dashboard's visualizations help provide a general idea of how students interact, describe their engagement, and are a promising tool for guiding activity design.
The national preschool curriculum in Mexico considers 80 hours for learning science during the school year. Early child science education is essential for developing skills and positive attitudes toward science. However, for the instruction to be successful, teachers must have adequate knowledge of science and science didactic. In the case of Mexico, preschool science curriculum and teacher preparation are insufficient. There are few professional development courses for in-service and pre-service teachers, and the material and textbooks for this educational level is limited. The Department of Physics Education of the National Polytechnic Institute (IPN) in Mexico had different projects that involve the design of curriculum, experiment manuals, evaluation tools, postgrad thesis, and teacher professional development workshops. This work presents the results and analysis of the evolution of these projects and their influence in classrooms.
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