Open-ended tasks can be both beneficial and challenging to students learning to program. Such tasks allow students to be more creative and feel ownership over their work, but some students struggle with unstructured tasks and, without proper scaffolds, this can lead to negative learning experiences. Scratch is a widely used coding platform to teach computer science in classrooms and is designed to support learner creativity and expression. With its open-ended nature, Scratch can be used in various ways in the classroom to meet the needs of schools and districts. One challenge of using Scratch in classrooms is supporting learners in exploring their interests and fostering creativity while still meeting the instructional goals of a lesson and ensuring all students are engaged with, and understand, focal concepts and practices.
In this paper, we investigate the use of planning sheets to fa- cilitate novice programmers designing and implementing Scratch programs based on open-ended prompts. To evaluate the plan- ning sheets, we look at how closely students’ implemented Scratch projects match their plans and whether the implemented Scratch projects met the technical requirements for the given lesson. We analyzed 303 Scratch projects from 155 middle grade students (ages 10-14) who were introduced to programming via the Scratch Encore Curriculum. Completed Scratch projects that used planning sheets (202) were qualitatively coded to evaluate how closely they matched the initial plan, and Scratch programs (303) were analyzed with an automated grader to check if technical project requirements were met. Our results reveal that students that used planning sheets met significantly more technical project requirements and had more complex structures than those that did not have planning sheets. Results differ based on teacher and type of planning sheet used (physical vs. virtual). This work suggests that planning sheets are a helpful tool for young learners when completing open-ended coding projects.
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Open OnDemand: HPC for everyone
Open OnDemand is an open source project designed to lower the barrier to HPC use across many diverse disciplines. Here we describe the main features of the platform, give several use cases of Open On-Demand and discuss how we measure success. We end the paper with a discussion of the future project roadmap.
Pre-conference paper submitted to ISC19 Workshop on Interactive High-Performance Computing.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1835725
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10122554
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- ISC 19
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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null (Ed.)Using a participatory observation approach, this paper aims at exploring how public and private organizations have collaborated in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. We examine the case of MechanicalVentilator Milano (MVM), an international project with over 250 contributors and partners; this project aimed to achieve the challenging goal of designing and realizing a mechanical ventilator for mass production in about 6 weeks. The project received the Emergency Use Authorization granted by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The MVM ventilator is a reliable, fail-safe, and easy-to-operate mechanical ventilator that can be produced quickly at a large-scale, based on the readily available parts. The success of the MVM case is unique as it adopts open innovation practices to generate technology innovation, in addition to a lean perspective. Through the MVM project description, this study offers a framework that explains the interplay between open innovation and lean approach, highlighting the different internal and external forces and types of collaborations, and offering fine-grained insights in to the role of universities as platforms of multidisciplinary knowledge. This framework might serve as a basis for future theoretical and empirical research, providing practitioners with new best practices that are essential when facing a severe crisis like COVID-19.more » « less
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