Aligned with our work on the Ada Computer Science platform, we are researching ways in which young people aged 14 to 18 learn computer science. Work in progress includes A/B interventions to investigate effective topic explanations and analysis of alternate conceptions through students’ answers to questions.
Ada Computer Science is a global computer science (CS) learning platform. It builds on joint work the University of Cambridge and the Raspberry Pi Foundation have done to support the English school system as part of the National Centre for Computing Education by creating the Isaac Computer Science platform.
The Ada platform is pre-populated with CS content and questions, and feedback is tailored to respond to common mistakes. Hints and explanation videos accompany questions. Question sets can be assigned to students by teachers, making it a useful tool for the classroom. Question types include Parsons problems, drag and drop, multiple-choice and text-matching answers, including Boolean Algebra responses.
Waite, J., Franceschini, A., Sentance, S., Patterson, M., & Sharkey, J. (2021, September). An online platform for teaching upper secondary school computer science. In United Kingdom and Ireland Computing Education Research conference. (pp. 1-7). https://doi.org/10.1145/3481282.3481287