Search

In this paper we present a software platform called Chatbot designed to introduce high school students to Computer Science (CS) concepts in an innovative way: by programming chatbots. A chatbot is a bot that can be programmed to have a conversation with a human or robotic partner in some natural language such as English or Spanish. While programming their chatbots, students use fundamental CS constructs such as variables, conditionals, and finite state automata, among others. Chatbot uses pattern matching, state of the art lemmatization techniques, and finite state automata in order to provide automatic formative assessment to the students. When an error is found, the formative feedback generated is immediate and task-level. We evaluated Chatbot in two observational studies. An online nation-wide competition where more than 10,000 students participated. And, a mandatory in-class 15-lesson pilot course in three high schools. We measured indicators of student engagement (task completion, participation, self reported interest, etc.) and found that girls' engagement with Chatbot was higher than boys' for most indicators. Also, in the online competition, the task completion rate for the students that decided to use Chatbot was five times higher than for the students that chose to use the renowned animation and game programming tool Alice. Our results suggest that the availability of automatic formative assessment may have an impact on task completion and other engagement indicators among high school students.

Copyright of RED - Revista de Educación a Distancia is the property of Universidad de Murcia and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper is part of an ongoing research which intends to analyze the experiences of beginner students of the Computer Science Careers of the Faculty of Mathematics, Astronomy and Physics of the Córdoba National University. During the first year of these careers the desertion level is high and there is an important percentage of students who can't past the exams. Using the situated learning theory proposed by Lave and Wenger (Lave, 1988; Lave & Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998) we want to describe the learning process that takes place during the encounter between beginner students just arrived to the university and the faculty community itself. We present a preliminary data analysis describing two analytic categories emerged in this first instance: «student- teacher relations and the legitimacies construction» and «identities construction». [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]