Hi Robert, thank you for your question. It depends on students' prior programming experience. We are piloting in two classrooms right now. In one classroom, more than half of the students have coded before (in school or at home). Those students did well exploring the tool in pairs, co-building a program and then sharing those programs in front of the class. The classroom teachers facilitated very little in the creation of student programs. In our other classroom fewer students have coded before and have needed more guidance, which has often taken the form of physically embodying computational commands and connecting computational outcomes to familiar lived experiences. 

Hi Scot, thank you for the feedback on the video.

We are focusing on 3rd graders for a couple reasons: 1) By third grade learners have typically made the transition from learning to read to reading for understanding. Coding and science both require interpretation of text, and by piloting our tools with 3rd graders we can be mostly certain that any difficulties students encounter are not solely due to misinterpreting unfamiliar words and phrases. I say "mostly" because language difficulties do still arise, albeit less frequently than they would with younger learners. 2) The context of our curriculum - ecosystems and habitats - align with both local and national science standards for Grade 3.

EcoMOD is investigating four separate research questions. The first two are student-centered and examine two interrelated strands of design-based research: design and cognition. Along the first strand EcoMOD investigates which approaches to abstraction and representation support students ability to construct, interpret and modify computational models of ecological systems.  Along the second dimension, we are also investigating changes in students' understanding of causal dynamics, computational thinking and ecosystems science content. Our hypothesis is that blending virtual immersive worlds with computational models can help make the epistemic goals of science explicit to young leaners. If true, we would expect to see growth not only in knowledge, but also in the practices through which that knowledge is produced. 

Our remaining research questions look at the role of teacher, how their use of the curriculum and tools unfolds in practice and what scaffolds and supports are needed. 

Hi Jessica! Yes, the work we are doing in classrooms now is helping us understand and assess how to support teachers in practice. In both classrooms the teachers have expressed uncertainty with regards to teaching inquiry through programming and supporting their students in the construction, testing and debugging process. This is primarily due to a lack of programming knowledge. We've noticed that teachers confidence with the tool has grown as they've had more opportunities to explore it, watch their students build programs and observe the kinds of questions we ask. Looking to next year, building in more time with the tool prior to implementation and providing examples of common student programs and bugs might help teachers feel more confident. 

We're currently developing our assessment strategy for EcoMOD during this pilot based on our previous work with EcoXPT and EcoMUVE. Pre- and post-surveys measuring content knowledge, understanding of causal mechanisms, and affective dimensions will be administered, video recordings of the class and screen captures of student computers will allow for grounded qualitative analysis, and student actions in the virtual worlds will be captured in log files. Additionally, interviews with a purposeful sample of students as well as teachers will allow us to refine our initial design for future testing.