CMU CS Academy Creative Tasks: How do students and teachers use them?

Lead Student Presenter(s)

Stephanie Eristoff

Abstract or Description

Carnegie Mellon University's CMU CS Academy is an online platform that offers project-based computer science (CS) courses for middle- and high-school students. The platform's pedagogy centers on experiential learning, allowing students to engage with CS concepts through interactive, project-based activities. Of particular note are the platform's Creative Tasks (CTs), which offer open-ended coding challenges designed to foster students' problem-solving, design skills, and creativity. These tasks span many topics and require students to use their computational knowledge to create unique programs. Examples include designing games and animations and constructing interactive stories. 

This work studies the effectiveness of CTs for student learning and their role in the classroom for both students and teachers. We analyzed CTs from multiple units and classes and looked into the complexity and design of the student's solutions and their respective grades. Our preliminary results show that: (1) Students often used landscapes and pop-cultural references in their CTs. (2) Students didn’t use culturally-responsive computing in their CTs, (3) There is little to no correlation between the number of shapes declared, the number of functions declared, the number of properties of shapes changed, and the grade of the respective CT.

The implications of this work are recommendations for the CMU CS Academy team, which include promoting more culturally responsive computing in Creative Tasks through pedagogy videos, including more landscape-based and pop-culture-based exercises for students, encouraging students to recreate earlier programs after learning more complex programmatic concepts, and making more pedagogy sessions for teacher regarding grading Creative Tasks.

Mentor

Ruben Martins