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STEMcoding Project Announces Big Updates and New Resources for Distance Learning

August 5, 2020

STEMcoding Project Announces Big Updates and New Resources for Distance Learning

Christopher Orban

Each summer is an opportunity to polish, improve and build new STEMcoding content that mixes computer science with traditional science and math learning objectives. With instructors facing extraordinary circumstances this fall with distance learning and hybrid learning due to covid19, we put in extra time to deliver new features to help students work from home and potentially without close proximity to a teacher or instructor.

The Milestones System

Until recently, the main way a student could know if their code was working correctly was to submit their code to their instructor to look over. This puts an extra burden on the instructor to frequently grade or give feedback to their students and on a short timescale. For more than a few students it becomes impractical. In May and June, we added what we call the “milestones system” to many of our classical mechanics activities. For these exercises, the student sees a list of objectives below the screen with either a green check mark, gray question mark or red X there to indicate whether the objective is met. We have funneled our experience with various ways that students mis-configure codes to determine if certain objectives are met or not. The result is instant feedback on whether they have made a particular modification to the code correctly.  by Christopher Orban

Read more:

https://u.osu.edu/stemcoding/2020/08/03/stemcoding-project-announces-big-updates-and-new-resources-for-distance-learning/