NDLI: Frogs to Think with: Improving Students' Computational Thinking and Understanding of Evolution in A Code-First Learning Environment

Content Provider	ACM Digital Library
Author	Levy, Sharona T. Horn, Michael S. Wagh, Aditi Wilensky, Uri Guo, Yu Brady, Corey
Abstract	This paper presents Frog Pond, an interactive code-first learning environment about biological evolution. We deployed Frog Pond as part of a six-day curricular unit on natural selection implemented in six 7th grade science classes. Here we describe a case study of two students, Charlie and Aaron who participated in the unit. Comparing pre- and post- interviews in which they were asked to design a program for a hypothetical simulation of evolution, we found that both students shifted from an event-based programming approach to a rule-based approach. Both students also drew upon their experience with Frog Pond to explain an evolutionary phenomenon. However, the level of sophistication of the two students' explanations varied along with the aspects of Frog Pond they drew upon. These findings have implications for design improvement to better support students' understanding of evolution.
Starting Page	246
Ending Page	254
Page Count	9
File Format	PDF
ISBN	9781450343138
DOI	10.1145/2930674.2930724
Language	English
Publisher	Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Publisher Date	2016-06-21
Publisher Place	New York
Access Restriction	Subscribed
Subject Keyword	Computational thinking Agent-based modeling Evolution Code-first learning environment
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article

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1	Ministry of Education (GoI), Department of Higher Education	Sanctioning Authority	https://www.education.gov.in/ict-initiatives
2	Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur	Host Institute of the Project: The host institute of the project is responsible for providing infrastructure support and hosting the project	https://www.iitkgp.ac.in
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4	Project PI / Joint PI	Principal Investigator and Joint Principal Investigators of the project	Dr. B. Sutradhar bsutra@ndl.gov.in Prof. Saswat Chakrabarti will be added soon
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Frogs to Think with: Improving Students' Computational Thinking and Understanding of Evolution in A Code-First Learning Environment