A First-in-Class Block-Based Programming Language Distance Calculation

Imbernón Cuadrado, Luis-Eduardo; Manjarrés Riesco, Ángeles; de la Paz López, Félix

doi:10.1007/978-3-031-06527-9_42

Cited by 1 publication

(5 citation statements)

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“…In this research, we used the distance calculation presented in [6], and we implemented a first prototype model for predicting when a primary school student will need help while performing block-based programming exercises.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The learning progress can be measured by calculating the distance between the student's workspace and the best candidate solution, i.e., the solution that is closest to the student's workspace according to the distance measure. Below we present a normalized version of the distance function presented in [6].…”

Section: Distance Calculation For Block-based Programming Languagesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, though different existing distance calculation approaches take into account the name and the position of the program blocks, they ignore other attributes like the block family, or the value of the block inputs. For this reason, in [6], we proposed a novel method for calculating distances in block-based programming languages.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In Ref. [6], the defined distance between the student's workspace and the solution varies depending on the difficulty of the exercise and the student's knowledge of Scratch. So each student will need help at different points in time.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This objective involves contributions in different research areas, in particular in the field of intelligent educational systems for teaching block-based programming and, in general, in the field of intelligent educational systems that provide automatic feedback, since the results of this work can be generalised to apply to other disciplines. The application of LSTM architectures in this domain, as well as the function proposed in [6] to evaluate the distance between the student's workspace and a given block-based programming exercise, are innovative.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Using LSTM to Identify Help Needs in Primary School Scratch Students

Imbernón Cuadrado,

Manjarrés Riesco,

de la Paz López

2023

Applied Sciences

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In the last few years, there has been increasing interest in the use of block-based programming languages as well as in the ethical aspects of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in primary school education. In this article, we present our research on the automatic identification of the need for assistance among primary school children performing Scratch exercises. For data collection, user experiences have been designed to take into account ethical aspects, including gender bias. Finally, a first-in-class distance calculation method for block-based programming languages has been used in a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) model, with the aim of identifying when a primary school student needs help while he/she carries out Scratch exercises. This model has been trained twice: the first time taking into account the gender of the students, and the second time excluding it. The accuracy of the model that includes gender is 99.2%, while that of the model that excludes gender is 91.1%. We conclude that taking into account gender in training this model can lead to overfitting, due to the under-representation of girls among the students participating in the experiences, making the model less able to identify when a student needs help. We also conclude that avoiding gender bias is a major challenge in research on educational systems for learning computational thinking skills, and that it necessarily involves effective and motivating gender-sensitive instructional design.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Distance Calculation For Block-based Programming Languagesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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