Page 72 - Getting the Picture Modeling and Simulation in Secondary Computer Science Education

70
Chapter 3
In simulation modeling, repeating the conceptualization stage or going back and forth between the conceptualization stage and formalization stage are considered to be an integral part of the modeling process (Law, 2015). In the specific case of ABM, the boundaries between all modeling stages are blurred and it is considered a good modeling practice to develop a model in minute increments, cycling continuously through all modeling stages (Wilensky & Rand, 2015).
3.3 Method
The data were collected by the first author during the project-based lesson series. In view of existing studies involving algorithmic thinking and programming (see the introduction), we decided to use a combination of several data sources as a promising approach for our exploration of the students’ activities and learning difficulties in their projects.
During their work in the class and the final presentations, screen and voice recordings were made of students’ groups. (No recordings were made of students working elsewhere, such as at home). Except for a few corrupted recordings, they were all transcribed verbatim. The project documentation of each group was collected. After receiving their grades, twelve students filled in an online survey individually where they were asked about how they approached the work on this project, difficulties they encountered, what they have learned, what they liked or disliked, and what suggestions they had for the improvement of the assignment. Students were also invited to be interviewed. Five semi-structured interviews were conducted with individual students. The students were requested to describe their projects and they were asked if they could design a new NetLogo model on the fly (i.e., draw a sketch of the interface on paper and describe the model in terms of agents and interactions). Finally, they were asked what they learned during their work on the projects. The interviews were recorded and transcribed verbatim.
Using atlas.ti CAQDAS software we performed a qualitative analysis of the recordings, project documentation, survey results, and interviews, with coding categories based on the elements of our operational definition: purpose, research, abstraction, formulation, requirements, specification, implementation, verification, validation, experiment, analysis, and finally, reflection. After coding, we ascertained the visibility of the modeling elements in each of the data sources (see table 3) and examined the students’ activities more in-depth, looking specifically for