In our September 大片免费播放网站片 seminar, we welcomed back Henriikka Vartiainen and Matti Tedre from the University of Eastern Finland. They introduced Somekone, a social media simulator that is designed to help learners understand some of the fundamental processes behind social media platforms. Their team has been developing AI education materials and tools since 2019, including GenAI Teachable Machine, which they presented at our May 大片免费播放网站片 seminar.

Collaboration and co-design

Henriikka explained that the development of the Somekone tool emerged from the team’s long-term collaboration with teachers and schools in Finland. They co-developed the tool with the aim of making concepts like data collection, engagement, profiling, recommendations, filter bubbles, and polarisation visible and explainable for students aged 11 to 13 years old.

A four-phase learning model

Henriikka described the pedagogical model that the team follows in all of their AI education interventions. Their goal is not only to support students to develop their understanding of AI concepts, but also to foster ethical awareness and a sense of agency.

• Phase 1: Contextualisation and familiarisation
  Students begin by discussing their 反贪风暴5国语完整版免费观看s with social media and their initial ideas about how platforms such as TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram work. This activates students’ prior knowledge and helps connect the learning to their own interests. It also enables teachers to uncover any misconceptions the students may have.
  
• Phase 2: Exploration
  Students explore their initial ideas by experimenting with the Somekone tool. They discover how different types of data are collected and combined for profiling in a way that connects these new concepts to their own everyday lives.
  
• Phase 3: Design and inquiry
  Students explore the Somekone tool more deeply. Teachers guide them through activities where the students analyse, interpret, and discuss the data they can see in the tool. Importantly, the data they are using has all been gathered from their activity on the platform. Students can see how the likes, follows, and comments they and their classmates make change the images they are shown, and this is all real time.
  
• Phase 4: Ethical and societal reflection
  Students reflect on what they have learnt and consider the broader impacts of social media. Teachers encourage them to think critically, question the way social media platforms currently work, and imagine alternatives. At the end of the project, students write letters to decision-makers with their suggestions for how social media could better serve children’s interests.

Inside the simulator

Matti then gave a live demonstration of Somekone. It showed that students log on to the tool and are then presented with an Instagram-style feed of images. They scroll through the feed and like, share, or comment on images that catch their attention or match their interests. For many students this is a very familiar type of environment, and they really enjoy playing with the app!

However, the unique value of Somekone is that it provides students with a real-time view of the way data is collected from every single user interaction, and demonstrates what is done with that data. It also allows students to experiment with a social media tool in the classroom without any data protection issues, as all of the data is stored locally.

Learners explore:

• Data collection in real time. Working in pairs, one student browses the image feed, while the other watches a live view of the data that the simulator is collecting every time their partner interacts with or simply pauses on a post.
  
• Profile building. Somekone shows how all this data accumulates to build a profile. Students watch their profiles developing based on the way they and their classmates are interacting with their feeds.
  
• Clustering and connections. Students then see how the tool groups profiles to create clusters of users with similar interests. Often friendship groups in the classroom are evident on screen because students sitting next to each other have all chosen to engage with the same things!

The simulator creates clusters of users with similar interests, which update in real time as students interact with posts on their feeds

• Explainable recommendations. A key feature of Somekone is that it provides explanations for why it recommends posts to users. Students learn that recommendations can be based on various things, such as the image’s tag matching the tag on other posts they liked, or the image being popular among other users with similar profiles to theirs. These are the mechanisms that underpin real recommendation systems, but Somekone makes them explicit.

The tool provides an explanation for why each post is recommended

• Filter bubbles and polarisation. A filter bubble forms when a user only sees social media posts that match their existing interests or beliefs, due to highly personalised recommendation systems. Somekone presents this concept in a visually compelling way through a heatmap showing all the content in the system, with a colour scale indicating which posts are most likely to be shown to a particular user, and which they will never encounter. By comparing different users’ filter bubbles side by side, students start to understand how polarisation can arise. As Matti said: “If our feeds are so different from each other that I never see the pictures that you see and you never see the pictures I see, then […] we don’t even share the same reality”.

Two users’ heatmaps presented side by side, showing their respective filter bubbles

• Algorithm settings. A key learning opportunity is that students can adjust the algorithm’s parameters and observe how this changes their feed and their filter bubble. They can choose between personalised or non-personalised recommendations, select how posts are ranked, and decide whether to allow any diversity in the popularity of posts recommended to them. This is key to ‘opening up the box’.

For teachers, the tool has a simple guided interface to make it easy to use in class. There is also a button that teachers can use to pause the app, stopping students from scrolling (much to their dismay!) in order to focus their attention on the teacher when they are explaining concepts.

Evidence of impact

The 大片免费播放网站片 team used pre- and post-tests to evaluate what impact the intervention had on students’ understanding of social media mechanisms and on their sense of agency in relation to data. They conducted the post-test a week after the intervention, and then also did a delayed post-test six months later to see whether any changes were sustained. They found:

• Improved understanding of key concepts. Learners showed statistically significant improvements in identifying different types of data traces and in understanding how data profiling works. They also showed some improvement in grasping recommendation mechanisms.

• Retention over time. These improvements were generally still evident six months later, particularly in the case of understanding data traces.

• Stronger sense of agency. The team found that students’ sense of data agency improved after taking part in the intervention. This is really important as students are more likely to want to study a topic further if they have feelings of agency and self-efficacy.

Accessing the tool

The Somekone tool is freely available online — in Finnish, English, German, and French — at somekone.gen-ai.fi. The developer Nick Pope has also made the source code available on GitHub at github.com/knicos/genai-somekone. 

However, the supporting materials and teacher resources are currently only available in Finnish and the underpinning pedagogies relate to the Finnish context.

Join our next seminar

Join us at our next seminar on Tuesday, 11 November from 17:00 to 18:30 GMT to hear Karl-Emil Bilstrup (Copenhagen University) speak about using the micro:bit to explore machine learning practices. We hope to see you there!

To sign up and take part in our 大片免费播放网站片 seminars, click below:

You can also view the schedule of our upcoming seminars, and catch up on past seminars on our previous seminars page.

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In our April 大片免费播放网站片 seminar, David Weintrop, Rotem Israel-Fishelson, and Peter Moon from the University of Maryland introduced API Can Code, a data science 反贪风暴5国语完整版免费观看 designed with high school students for high school students. Their talk explored how their innovative work uses real-world data and students’ own 反贪风暴5国语完整版免费观看s and interests to create meaningful, authentic learning 反贪风暴5国语完整版免费观看s in data science.

Quick note for educators: Are you interested in joining our free, exploratory data science education workshop for teachers on 10 July 2025 in Cambridge, UK? Then find out the details here.

David started by explaining the motivation behind the API Can Code project. The team’s goal was not to turn students into future data scientists, but to offer students the data literacy they need to explore and critically engage with a data-driven world. 

The work was also guided by a shared view among leading teachers’ organisations that data science should be taught across all subjects in the K–12 反贪风暴5国语完整版免费观看. It also draws on strong 大片免费播放网站片 showing that when educational 反贪风暴5国语完整版免费观看s connect with students’ own lives and interests, it leads to deeper engagement and better learning outcomes.

Reviewing the landscape

To prepare for the design of the 反贪风暴5国语完整版免费观看, David, Rotem, and Peter wanted to understand what data science education options already exist for K–12 students. Rotem described how they compared four major K–12 data science curricula and examined different aspects, such as the topics they covered and the datasets they used. Their findings showed that many datasets were quite small in size, and that the datasets used were not always about topics that students were interested in.

The team also looked at 30 data science tools used across different K–12 platforms and analysed what each could do. They found that tools varied in how effective they were and that many lacked 成人久久a片一区无码熟妇 features to support students with diverse learning needs. 

This analysis helped to refine the team’s objective: to create a data science 反贪风暴5国语完整版免费观看 that students find interesting and that is informed by their values and voices.

Participatory design

To work towards this goal, the team used a methodology called participatory design. This is an approach that actively involves the end users — in this case, high school students — in the design process. During several in-person sessions with 28 students aged 15 to 18 years old, the 大片免费播放网站片ers facilitated low-tech, hands-on activities exploring the students’ identities and interests and how they think about data.

One activity, Empathy Map, involved students working together to create a persona representing a student in their school. They were asked to describe the persona’s daily life, interests, and concerns about technology and data:

The students’ involvement in the design process gave the team a better understanding of young people’s views and interests, which helped create the design of the API Can Code 反贪风暴5国语完整版免费观看.

API Can Code: three units, three key tools

Peter provided an overview of the API Can Code 反贪风暴5国语完整版免费观看. It follows a three-unit flow covering different concepts and tools in each unit:

1. Unit 1 introduces students to different types of data and data science terminology. The unit explores the role of data in the students’ daily lives, how use and misuse of data can affect them, different ways of collecting and presenting data, and how to evaluate databases for aspects such as size, recency, and trustworthiness. It also introduces them to RapidAPI, a hub that connects to a wide range of APIs from different providers, allowing students to access real-world data such as Zillow housing prices or Spotify music data.
2. Unit 2 covers the 大片免费播放网站片 skills used in data science, including the use of programming tools to run efficient data science techniques. Students learn to use EduBlocks, a block-based programming environment where students can draw in JSON files from RapidAPI datasets, and process and filter data without needing a lot of text-based programming skills. The students also compare this approach with manual data processing, which they discover is very slow.
3. Unit 3 focuses on data analysis, visualisation, and interpretation. Students use CODAP, a web-based interactive data science tool, to calculate summary statistics, create graphs, and perform analyses. CODAP is a user-friendly but powerful platform, making it perfect for students to analyse and visualise their data sets. Students also practise interpreting pre-made graphs and the graphs and statistics that they are creating.

Peter described an example activity carried out by the students, showing how these three units flow together and build both technical skills and an understanding of the real-world uses of data science. Students were tasked with analysing a dataset from Zillow, a property website, to explore the question “How much does a house in my neighbourhood cost?” The images below show the process the students followed, which uses the data science skills and tools from all three units of the 反贪风暴5国语完整版免费观看.

Interest-driven learning in action

A central tenet of API Can Code is that students should explore data that matters to them. A diverse range of student interests was identified during the design work, and the 反贪风暴5国语完整版免费观看 uses these areas of interest, such as music, movies, sports, and animals, throughout the lessons.

The 反贪风暴5国语完整版免费观看 also features an open-ended final project, where students can choose a 大片免费播放网站片 question that is important to them and their lives, and answer it using data science skills.

The team shared two examples of memorable final projects. In one, a student set out to answer the question “Is Jhené Aiko a star?” The student found a publicly available dataset through an API provided by Deezer, a music streaming platform. She wrote a program that retrieved data on the artist’s longevity and collaborations, analysed the data, and concluded that Aiko is indeed a star. What stood out about this project wasn’t just the fact that the student independently defined stardom and answered their 大片免费播放网站片 question using real data, but that this was a truly personal, interest-driven project. David noted that the 大片免费播放网站片ers could never have come up with this activity, since they had never previously heard of Jhené Aiko!

Another student’s project analysed data about housing in Washington DC to answer the question “Which ward in DC has the most affordable houses?” Rotem explained that this student was motivated by her family thinking about moving away from the city. She wanted to use her project to persuade her parents to stay by identifying the most affordable ward in DC that they could move to. She was excited by the outcome of her project, and she presented her findings to other students and her parents.

These projects underscore the power of personally important data science projects driven by students’ interests. When students care about the questions they are exploring, they’re more invested in the process and more likely to keep using the skills and concepts they learn.

Resources

API Can Code is available online and completely free to use. Teachers can access lesson plans, tutorial videos, assessment rubrics, and more from the 反贪风暴5国语完整版免费观看’s website https://apicancode.umd.edu/. The site also provides resources to support students, including example programs and glossaries.

Join our next seminar

In our current seminar series, we’re exploring teaching about AI and data science. Join us at our next seminar on Tuesday, 17 June from 17:00 to 18:30 BST to hear Netta Iivari (University of Oulu) introduce transformative agency and its importance for children’s 大片免费播放网站片 education in the age of AI.

To sign up and take part in our 大片免费播放网站片 seminars, click below:

You can also view the schedule of our upcoming seminars, and catch up on past seminars on our previous seminars and recordings page.

The post Bringing data science to life for K–12 students with the ‘API Can Code’ 反贪风暴5国语完整版免费观看 appeared first on 饥饿的女儿国语版第1集剧情.

In the latest seminar of our series on 大片免费播放网站片 education for primary-aged children, attendees heard about two 大片免费播放网站片 studies that explore the use of ScratchJr in K–2 education. The speaker, Apittha (Aim) Unahalekhala, is a graduate 大片免费播放网站片er at the DevTech 大片免费播放网站片 Group at Tufts University. The two studies looked at assessing young children’s ScratchJr coding projects and understanding how they create projects. Both of the studies were part of the Coding as Another Language project, which sees computer science as a new literacy for the 21st century, and is developing a literacy-based coding 反贪风暴5国语完整版免费观看 for K–2.

How to evaluate children’s ScratchJr projects

ScratchJr offers children 28 blocks to choose from when creating a coding project. Some of these are simple, such as blocks that determine the look of a character or setting, while others are more complex, such as messaging blocks and loops. Children can combine the blocks in many different ways to create projects of different levels of complexity.

At the start of her presentation, Aim described a rubric that she and her colleagues at DevTech have developed to assess three key aspects of a ScratchJr coding project. These aspects are coding concepts, project design, and purposefulness.

• Coding concepts in ScratchJr are sequencing, repeats, events, parallelism, coordination, and the number parameter
• Project design includes elaboration (number of settings and characters, use of speech bubbles) and originality (character and background customisation, animated looks, sounds)

The rubric lets educators or 大片免费播放网站片ers:

• Assess learners’ ability to use their coding knowledge to create purposeful and creative ScratchJr projects
• Identify the level of mastery of each of the three key aspects demonstrated within the project
• Identify where learners might need more guidance and support

As part of the study, Aim and her colleagues collected coding projects from two schools at the start, middle, and end of a 反贪风暴5国语完整版免费观看 unit. They used the rubric to evaluate the coding projects and found that project scores increased over the course of the unit.

They also found that, overall, the scores for the project design elements were higher than those for coding concepts: many learners enjoyed spending lots of time designing their characters and settings, but made less use of other features. However, the two scores were correlated, meaning that learners who devoted a lot of time to the design of their project also got higher scores on coding concepts.

The rubric is a useful tool for any teachers using ScratchJr with their students. If you want to try it in your classroom, the validated rubric is free to download from the DevTech 大片免费播放网站片 group’s website.

How do young children create a project?

The rubric assesses the output created by a learner using ScratchJr. But learning is a process, not just an end outcome, and the final project might not always be an accurate reflection of a child’s understanding.

By understanding more about how young children create coding projects, we can improve teaching and 反贪风暴5国语完整版免费观看 design for early childhood 大片免费播放网站片 education.

In the second study Aim presented, she set out to explore this question. She conducted a qualitative observation of children as they created coding projects at different stages of a 反贪风暴5国语完整版免费观看 unit, and used Google Analytics data to conduct a quantitative analysis of the steps the children took.

Her findings highlighted the importance of encouraging young learners to explore the full variety of blocks available, both by guiding them in how to find and use different blocks, and by giving them the time and tools they need to explore on their own.

She also found that different teaching strategies are needed at different stages of the 反贪风暴5国语完整版免费观看 unit to support learners. This helps them to develop their understanding of both basic and advanced blocks, and to explore, customise, and iterate their projects.

Early-unit strategy:

• Encourage free play to self-discover different functions, especially basic blocks

Mid-unit strategy:

• Set plans on how long children will need on customising vs coding
• More guidance on the advanced blocks, then let children explore

End-of-unit strategy:

• Provide multiple sessions to work
• Promote iteration by encouraging children to keep improving code and adding details

You can watch Aim’s full presentation here:

You can also access the seminar slides here.

Join our next seminar on primary 大片免费播放网站片 education

At our next seminar, we welcome Aman Yadav (Michigan State University), who will present 大片免费播放网站片 on computational thinking in primary school. The session will take place online on Tuesday 7 November at 17:00 UK time. Don’t miss out and sign up now:

To find out more about connecting 大片免费播放网站片 to practice for primary 大片免费播放网站片 education, you can find the rest of our upcoming monthly seminars on primary (K–5) teaching and learning and watch the recordings of previous seminars in this series.

The post Young children’s ScratchJr coding projects: Assessment and support appeared first on 饥饿的女儿国语版第1集剧情.