CAREER: Looking Glass: Leveraging Mentor Interactions to Create Personalized Programming Help for Independent Learners

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This project will amplify the efforts of computer scientists who do outreach to middle school students by capturing mentor-mentee interactions and using this captured content to create a virtual mentoring system to support independent learners (children without access to computer science experts) within the Looking Glass programming environment. Looking Glass is a novice programming environment that presents programming as a means to the motivating end of creating 3D animated stories. In the system to be developed, mentors will do three things: First, a mentor watches the story-programs his or her mentee created and writes a code suggestion: new or revised functionality that will help to improve the mentees' programs. Next, the mentor edits a draft tutorial that Looking Glass has automatically generated from the mentor's code suggestion. Looking Glass then sends this edited tutorial to the mentee. Finally, the mentor writes rules that help Looking Glass identify contexts in which that code suggestion could be helpful. Looking Glass will use the mentor-contributed code suggestions, personalized tutorials, and rules to provide virtual mentoring for independent learners. Specifically, this project will explore three hypotheses: Hypothesis One: The approach of capturing and evaluating mentor-created learning materials will enable the creation of a virtual mentoring system to support independent learners. Hypothesis Two: Independent learners who are presented with in-context code suggestions that both further their stories and introduce new programming concepts will develop greater programming skills than those without access to these suggestions. Hypothesis Three: Independent learners who are presented with personalized tutorials based on their experience level with each topic presented will perform better than independent learners who are presented with a single level of scaffolding. The National Academy of Engineering lists personalized learning as one of the grand challenges for engineering in this century. This project will develop and evaluate the impact of two techniques for personalizing learning: program-specific code suggestions and personalized, multi-level tutorials. The majority of research into educational environments has focused on formal educational settings, but Looking Glass will advance research in how to effectively support independent learning in open-ended software environments. The enhancement to Looking Glass will provide an environment for exploring computer programming and learning support through virtual mentoring to middle school children without access to computer science learning opportunities. The project's educational plan uses biographies of computer scientists integrated into Looking Glass and a research blog to help middle school children develop an accurate image of computer science.