Documentation comes to life in computational thinking acquisition with agentsheets

This paper is about the use of live documentation in Computational Thinking Acquisition (CTA) programs with AgentSheets. AgentSheets is a visual programming environment to build games. Based on previous studies showing that semiotic relations among visual game elements could be further explored to the benefit of the learners, we designed PoliFacets, a Web extension to AgentSheets cast as a live conversational document. With it, teachers and learners can follow different threads of conversation about (multiple representations of) game elements and relations between them. We present a qualitative evaluation study of PoliFacets with two experienced AgentSheets instructors and three school teachers trained to coach students in CTA programs. Findings show that although our system has not yet completely fulfilled our design intent, it has led participants to gain relevant insights about their teaching and learning, as well as to articulating doubts and misunderstandings that otherwise could have gone unnoticed.

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