CSSE Seminar Series (CSSESS)
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Seminar
Virtual Worlds:
Evaluating CS education activities through automated monitoring.
Speaker: David Thompson, Ph.D. student.
Institute: CSSE, UC.
Time/Place: 3:10 pm, Friday, 14 May, in Room 031, Erskine Building.
All are welcome.
Abstract
It is possible to expose students to a range of Computer Science (CS) concepts without requiring them to be able to program first. One approach is to provide activities in "Second Life" and similar virtual worlds where the students can experience part of an algorithm or other concept by navigating in the virtual world. Not only does this offer a rich range of possibilities for presenting CS concepts, but it also allows us to evaluate the effectiveness more precisely than in the physical world because of the opportunities to monitor students' actions precisely. This seminar will survey a number of methods for automated data capture from virtual environments such as "Second Life" and "OpenSim" for the purpose of evaluating such experiences. We look at ways to extract data from various points in the usersimulation system, and review them with respect to a range of considerations including ease of analysis, effect on performance, difficulty of implementation, and ethical/privacy issues for researchers and educators.
View past or future seminars; or view the CSSESS Home Page.