Ateneo Laboratory for the Learning Sciences

The EDM Workbench found its first users during the 2012 Pittsburgh Science of Learning Summer School held in Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA from August 6 to 10. Kristen DiCerbro of Pearson Inc. and Dr. Khusro Kidwai of Pennsylvania State University used the EDM Workbench to analyze data from one of Pearson’s educational games, Poptropica.  They attempted to build a model of student seriousness.  In order to do so, they labeled 529 clips and then built a decision tree model using the labeled data.  They used the Workbench to support the clipping and labeling tasks. According to them, the Workbench was able to save them the time they would have spent either clipping the data manually or writing a utility program to do so.
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In the hopes of encouraging more young people to study computer science, Ma. Mercedes T. Rodrigo and Tricia Monsod (CS ’12) made a presentation about affective computing to one class of Miriam College High School students. Dr. Rodrigo began the presentation with an overview of affective computing and the types of research conducted by the Ateneo Laboratory of the Learning Sciences.  The highlight of the talk, though, was Ms. Monsod’s presentation of Jason King Li’s (CS ’12) and her thesis, School of Thought, an affect-sensitive game.  Mr. Resty Collado of Miriam as well as two students tried the game, to their delight. ALLS and DISCS are scheduled to conduct more of these talks in other high schools around the country.

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