RESEARCH

Objective

The objective of the Leonardo project is to investigate technology-rich elementary science education with a focus on interactive scientific modeling and representational reasoning.

Research & Development Thrusts

Developing CyberPads, intelligent virtual science notebooks with sketch-based multimodal interfaces
Developing PadMates, CyberPad-embedded intelligent virtual assistants to support interactive scientific modeling
Evaluating the synergistic impact of intelligent virtual science notebooks and intelligent virtual assistants on elementary science learning

Demonstrated Efficacy and Results

Significant learning gains on students’ pre/post scores from Leonardo implementations of Electricity and Magnetism
Leonardo online teacher training successfully delivered online across multiple states
Extensive interviews with teachers using Leonardo find it to be of great benefit to elementary classrooms
Leonardo cyberlearning authoring system, Composer, developed for non-technical subject matter experts (ITS Generalized Framework for Intelligent Tutoring Systems Workshop 2014)
Pilot work on natural language analysis of student argumentation with Leonardo using LSA (AERA 2014, International Conference on Learning Analytics & Knowledge 2014)
Automated answer assessment techniques investigated for short answer textual responses (Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications 2014)
“Sketch mining” techniques for automatically analyzing student visual renderings (Educational Data Mining 2014)

Authoring Technologies

Composer curriculum authoring tool facilitates authoring of curricular content by non-technical subject matter experts
Multiple authors can share and collaboratively develop curricular content for the CyberPad virtual science notebook
Agent dialogue and behavior authorable by non-technical subject matter experts
Web-deployed and cloud-based storage

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