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Toward facilitating assistance to students attempting engineering design problems

Published: 12 August 2013 Publication History

Abstract

In engineering design courses, many problems have a specification that the student's implementation must meet, but give the student a large range of freedom for the internal design of that implementation. There may be several distinct, correct strategies for solving them, some of which may be unknown to the teaching staff or intelligent tutor designer. When a student is pursuing an unrecognized strategy and begins to struggle, staff may redirect them, costing unnecessary work, and automated hint generators may offer unhelpful feedback. We have taken a first step toward discovering these alternate correct strategies by visualizing many student solutions together, using dynamic and static features of these solutions, so that the teaching staff can understand the space of correct strategies. This approach has been applied to two domains: an online Matlab programming challenge and an undergraduate computer architecture course. We discuss these initial investigations and pose discussion questions to the community about potential enhancement and application of this analysis.

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Cited By

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  • (2021)QLens: Visual Analytics of MUlti-step Problem-solving Behaviors for Improving Question DesignIEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics10.1109/TVCG.2020.303033727:2(870-880)Online publication date: Feb-2021
  • (2019)PeerLensProceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3290605.3300864(1-12)Online publication date: 2-May-2019
  • (2018)Understanding the Effects of Lecturer Intervention on Computer Science Student BehaviourProceedings of the 2017 ITiCSE Conference on Working Group Reports10.1145/3174781.3174787(105-124)Online publication date: 30-Jan-2018
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  1. Toward facilitating assistance to students attempting engineering design problems

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    ICER '13: Proceedings of the ninth annual international ACM conference on International computing education research
    August 2013
    202 pages
    ISBN:9781450322430
    DOI:10.1145/2493394
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 12 August 2013

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    Author Tags

    1. computer science education
    2. digital design
    3. pattern recognition
    4. problem solving process

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    ICER '13
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    ICER '13: International Computing Education Research Conference
    August 12 - 14, 2013
    San California, San Diego, USA

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    ICER '13 Paper Acceptance Rate 22 of 70 submissions, 31%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 189 of 803 submissions, 24%

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    ICER 2025
    ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research
    August 3 - 6, 2025
    Charlottesville , VA , USA

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    Cited By

    View all
    • (2021)QLens: Visual Analytics of MUlti-step Problem-solving Behaviors for Improving Question DesignIEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics10.1109/TVCG.2020.303033727:2(870-880)Online publication date: Feb-2021
    • (2019)PeerLensProceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3290605.3300864(1-12)Online publication date: 2-May-2019
    • (2018)Understanding the Effects of Lecturer Intervention on Computer Science Student BehaviourProceedings of the 2017 ITiCSE Conference on Working Group Reports10.1145/3174781.3174787(105-124)Online publication date: 30-Jan-2018
    • (2017)PathViewerProceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3025453.3025819(960-964)Online publication date: 2-May-2017
    • (2015)OverCodeACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction10.1145/269975122:2(1-35)Online publication date: 10-Mar-2015
    • (2014)Interacting with massive numbers of student solutionsAdjunct Proceedings of the 27th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology10.1145/2658779.2661167(17-20)Online publication date: 5-Oct-2014
    • (2014)CodewebsProceedings of the 23rd international conference on World wide web10.1145/2566486.2568023(491-502)Online publication date: 7-Apr-2014
    • (2013)Visualizing and classifying multiple solutions to engineering design problemsProceedings of the ninth annual international ACM conference on International computing education research10.1145/2493394.2493421(175-176)Online publication date: 12-Aug-2013

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