Hello, Everyone :)

This week, I was able to accomplish the full on case study that my research mates and I will conduct with elementary students. This case study will really provide us with important details, ensuring that our block language (Hopper’s Fables) will be a block language of the kids. Out of the 8 games that we collected terms forth, my fellow Scientist Cindi made a reduced list of the common words and at the end we have 7 major groups of words. As of right now, we are waiting for Dr. Driver to find us a classroom of students to conduct of study. The students participating will be around 2nd to 4th grade. In additon, this week we finialized the IRB form together as well as the consent forms.

Our teams goal now is to again do more graphics and to build on the block functionalities. In addition, we are preparing for a big conference that will be in a few weeks! We will be presenting a poster and we want to really step up our game in our research so that we have a lot of cool and exciting information to share at the SIGCSE Conference. In addition, each of us will be evalutaing 2 exisiting block programming languages that we picked our against the rubric we made and sent to the School of Education for thoughts.

What I learned this week was that the most information we will be able to learn from the students in the case study is through different types of “assesments”. In other words, asking the same quesion in different way because they most likely will answer each way differently and provide us with very useful information. I had to think of how I would like to be asked, and figured out through asking stuff differently, you can learn a lot from. In addition, I learned that it is very important for us as the creators, to make sure we also make the students the creators. This is because, since we are making a block programming language for students, we have to make sure that we involve them in the creation process as much as possible. This will give us the best effect.