Monitoring Children's Learning Through Wearable Eye-Tracking: The Case of a Making-Based Coding Activity

Abstract

Learning activities for/with children include rich interactions with peers, tutors and learning materials (in digital or physical form). During such activities, children gain new knowledge and master their skills. Automatized and continuous monitoring of childrens learning is a complex task, but, if efficient, can greatly enrich teaching and learning. Wearable devices, such as eye-tracking glasses, have the capacity to continuously and unobtrusively monitor childrens interactions, and such interactions might be capable of predicting childrens learning. In this work we set out to quantify the extent to which childrens gaze, captured with eye-tracking glasses, can predict their learning. To do so, we collected data from a case study with 44 children (8-17 years old) during a making-based coding activity. Our analysis shows that childrens gaze can predict their learning with 15.79% error. Our results also identify the most important gaze measures with respect to childrens learning, and pave the way for new research in this area.

Motion-Based Educational Games: Using Multi-Modal Data to Predict Player’s Performance

“…As well, we show the feasibility of early prediction. Though our learning context was limited to mathematics, our results echo and augment the findings of Giannakos et al [16], [17], by showing that gaze and physiological from wristbands data can afford highly accurate early estimates of student performance, in the context of educational MBTGs. We note that the Kinect is no longer supported by Microsoft, however there exist other motion-based sensing technologies from which skeleton data can be extracted [11], and in no way are our results platform dependant.…”

Eye tracking in Child Computer Interaction: Challenges and opportunities

“…To capture eye gaze data, 22 different models of eye tracking hardware were used. The brand that was predominately used within research studies was Tobii n=20, with 8 different models of their eye tracking hardware used, including screen-based hardware such as Tobii TX300 and T120, and Tobii glasses which have been used within programming along with SMI glasses [55][56][57][58][59]. There were 20 studies that used custom made technologies including web cams and Microsoft Kinect to analyse either eye tracking or eye gaze, predominately in the area of robot child interaction [67][68][69][70][71][72].…”

“…A large proportion of the studies, 29 out of 66 papers reviewed, use screen-based eye trackers from manufactures including SMI, Eyelink, Eye Tribe, Mirametrix and Tobii. Whilst there were 8 studies that used glasses from brands including Arrington Research [29,51], ASL Mobile [60] and Tobii and SMI [55][56][57][58][59]. Notably there was only one virtual reality eye tracker used, the Vive Pro Eye which was used in two separate studies [43 & 49].…”

Children’s Play and Problem Solving in Motion-Based Educational Games: Synergies between Human Annotations and Multi-Modal Data

“…MBEG). Recently, CCI researchers on the cusp of MMD and education [33,71,101] have demonstrated the value of applying wearable and sensing devices to learning environments. However, MMD measures only report on specifically predefined metrics selected by researchers, and cannot discern children's nuanced behaviours.…”

“…Such data collections empower us to transcend the limits of human observation, by accessing real-time information on children's seemingly "invisible" cognitive, affective and physiological states [92]. Accordingly, sensing technologies are gaining traction as useful, reliable means of investigative practice for understanding multi-faceted problem solving phenomena and supporting learning in-situ [11,19], specifically in the domain of children's problem solving behaviours during interactive learning experiences [33,51,52,71]. Additionally, sensing technologies and their respective MMD, allow us to closely monitor and understand children's play and problem solving behaviours, leveraging the key affordances of MMD (e.g., temporality and direct access to indicators of children's cognitive and affective processes [19]).…”