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It is common for students to multi-task and use their mobile devices while in class for studying or other activities. This research aims to leverage this situation by developing a mobile classroom learning software to help students solve interactive problems in their mobile devices in order to improve their class engagement and problem solving skills. This paper presents the design and development of the mobile classroom response software to communicate, collaborate and evaluate inclass interactive problem solving activities using mobile devices. The software facilitates various pedagogical approaches that reported to enhance student learning. The software is designed to be easy-to-use and maintainable. MRS is extensible and can render interactive problems developed by third party developer. Software quality matrices for the developed code and the user interface are presented to justify above stated objectives.
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Assessing Elementary Students’ Engineering Design Thinking with an “Evaluate-And-Improve” Task (Fundamental)
Although curricular resources for elementary engineering design continue to grow, it remains challenging to identify assessment tools that focus on students’ reasoning within engineering design and that are feasible for classroom use and accessible for emerging writers. In collaboration with third-grade teachers, we developed an open-response task that asks students to evaluate and improve on the first iteration of a design solution. In this paper, we present the assessment task and an exploratory analysis of the pre- and post-unit responses collected from one classroom implementation using the final version of the task. The evaluate-and-improve assessment task presents a diagram of an unbalanced, lopsided cart for transporting classroom plants and asks students to identify problems with the cart design, propose changes to improve it, and justify those proposed changes. Across their pre- and post-unit responses, the 18 students proposed 14 different changes and provided seven different justifications to support those changes. Students included more justifications in their post-unit explanations, especially when they did not include any justifications in their pre-unit responses. Our exploratory study of this evaluate and improve task suggests that it gives third-grade students an opportunity to demonstrate their ability to scope problems, propose design iterations, and justify those changes.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1657218
- PAR ID:
- 10344598
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- American Society for Engineering Education
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--36706
