Date of Award

12-2018

Degree Type

Report

Degree Name

Master of Science (MS)

Department

Computer Science

Committee Chair(s)

Vicki Allan

Committee

Vicki Allan

Abstract

Assessment plays a significant role in today’s educational field. When creating an assessment tool, we should keep in mind that the tool measures learning, supports learning and encourages learning. Many assessment tools are available in the educational market such as Dr. Scratch, FCS1 Assessment Instrument, and Beyond the rubric. These tools help teachers to evaluate students’ performance in programming activities, but they do not completely measure the creativity shown by students in programming. For example, Dr. Scratch measures abstraction, problem decomposition, and parallelism. FCS1 Assessment Instrument measures a set of foundational computer science concepts like variables, loops, and arrays. It also evaluates pseudo-code used for programming languages and multiple-choice questions in the form of definitions, tracing, and code completion. By improving assessment tools, teachers can more effectively evaluate code written by students. Better measurement of student creativity can also align students’ assessments with valued learning goals.

Using the data extracted from applications submitted to App Inventor, we created a tool which will measure the degree of creativity and completion in an app. Data features were extracted with XML and Python code. We then derived a formula to measure completion and creativity in those features. Finally, we tested our formula based on various scenarios. With the results obtained on testing our tool for various scenarios, we obtained the accuracy scores for completion and creativeness. With those scores, we found out the limitations of the tool and advantages of the tool.

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