Researching AI in the Data Science classroom

The Pymble Data Science team (which teaches classes from Year 9 to 10) has been working on pilot research which has been co-designed with the University of Technology Sydney and Pymble Ladies’ College. The goal of the research is to help teachers design even more effective online tasks in future. This joint project brings together academics from UTS Education and International Studies (Professor Nick Hopwood, Dr Tracey-Ann Palmer, Dr Mun Yee Lai) and UTS Data Science Institute (Dr Kun Yu, Dr Yifei Dong) with Data Science teachers (Cedric Le Bescont, Anthony England, Kim Maksimovic and Dr Glen McCarthy). Victoria Adamovich, the Pymble Institute’s Research Assistant, is coordinating the project along with Dr Gloria Koh from UTS.

The project is investigating how we can use new technology (specifically Artificial Intelligence) to better understand what it is like for students working on online tasks. Technology developed by Dr Yu, Dr Dong and colleagues from the Data Science Institute can track where students look on the screen, for how long, where they move the cursor, how intensely they focus, and facial expressions including eye and head movement which suggest concentration and distraction. The data collected is not in video nor photo-form, but has been transferred into code. The code helps the researchers understand student engagement – what students pay attention to when they are working on a task, how long they remain focused on the screen, what might be more or less challenging in the task and what happens to eyes and the body in different parts of the task.

The UTS team are working with students from our Data Science classes as they work on an online task relating to their curriculum. Focus groups are helping to unpack how students experienced the task. The researchers will then put both types of data together to understand the features of tasks that work most effectively to engage students. 

We are looking forward to opportunities for Pymble’s Data Science students to then go ‘behind the scenes’ with the UTS team as they learn more about the technology and how research is utilised. The current pilot will pave the path for larger studies in other schools in the near future.

For more information, contact the Pymble Institute, pymbleinstitute@pymblelc.nsw.edu.au