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Evaluation of teachers’ orchestration tools usage in robotic classrooms

Barbara Bruno, Pierre Dillenbourg, Aditi Kothiyal, Sina Shahmoradi

Teachers’ self-efficacy in managing classrooms is an important consideration when it comes to bringing educational robots to classrooms. Orchestration tools support teachers by providing awareness indicators of students’ progress as well as levers to control the flow of the lesson. We designed and evaluated the impact of an orchestration tool for a series of robot-based learning activities to teach a basic concept in mathematics to children, aged 7-10. Six teachers in primary schools across Switzerland used the orchestration tool to manage the activities in six sessions involving a total of ninety-one students. We observed teachers’ usage of the orchestration tool during the sessions and interviewed them after the sessions about the usefulness of these functionalities. Our findings show that even though teachers used the tool in different ways from each other, in general, it supported them in their classroom orchestration practices, mainly to manage the activity sequence and get aware of the robot technical failures and, to a lesser degree, get aware of students’ progress for the purpose of activity transitions and enriching class discussions. We discuss the theoretical implications of these results, relating our findings to the literature on classroom orchestration tool design, especially highlighting the importance of educational level and the type of learning technology as contextual factors affecting teachers’ usage of orchestration tools. We also provide implications for designing orchestration tools, focusing on the necessity of providing different types of awareness indicators and multiple options for activity management to fulfil the variety of teachers’ orchestration needs.

2023

Sustainability and Ethicality are Peripheral to Students’ Software Design

Pierluca Borsò, Bryan Alexander Ford, Siara Ruth Isaac, Aditi Kothiyal

The conceptual design phase is a fascinating moment to observe how a design task is interpreted, as the (often implicit) relative importance students accord to the various requirements and constraints offers a window into the thinking underpinning their designs. Our qualitative study used the think-aloud protocol with 11 third year computer science students working on a software design task to investigate the criteria that students used to guide and evaluate their developing conceptual designs. While the trio of feasibility, economic viability, and consumer desirability are often used in design decisions, our analysis also looked for how aspects of ethics (i.e. ethicality) and sustainability informed students’ thinking. We found that considerations of feasibility and consumer desirability dominated students’ thinking, while economic constraints were rarely addressed and even less often the economic impact pertaining directly to the software design. Students’ consideration of ethicality in terms of data privacy and accommodations for disability (an explicit criterion in the design task) indicate that many students did not see ethical aspects as sufficiently important to influence their design choices. Sustainability was introduced tangentially in the design task but was absent from students’ thinking and design decisions. Our findings suggest that ethicality and sustainability should be explicitly included in the design thinking model taught to students for software design to ensure that they bring these considerations to their professional work and therefore to the next generation of software.

2023