Understanding Students' Problem-Solving Strategies in a Synergistic Learning-by-Modeling Environment

We present a systems thinking approach to help middle school students learn about diffusion processes in liquids using CTSiM, an open-ended learning environment. Students model and analyze the collision of individual particles, and then scale up the process to understand diffusion as an emergent behavior of particles. A classroom study shows that the intervention helped students achieve significant learning gains. We also observed synergistic learning of domain knowledge and computational thinking skills. To understand students’ problem-solving processes, we used a sequence mining algorithm to discover frequent activity patterns and link them to learning.

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