Celebrating learning with Data Science

What is better than starting a research project? Being together for discussion when the results are in!

There was an energetic buzz in the room when the Pymble Data Science teaching team and academics from UTS Education and International Studies and UTS Data Science Institute, held a focus group to discuss emerging results of the facial recognition project. The pilot project investigated how we can use Artificial Intelligence to better understand student engagement in online tasks. Technology developed by Dr Yu, Dr Dong and colleagues from the UTS 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 was not in video, nor photo form but was transferred into code. The code helped the researchers understand student engagement and was amplified when matched with qualitative feedback from student focus groups. The coded data was aligned with focus group data from a sub-group of participating students.

The buzz in the room arose as the teachers responded to the academics’ work which highlighted three ‘personas’ of Data Science students. One of the academics commented: “I have rarely been part of a group that was so energised and filled with such infectious enthusiasm for research findings!”

The teachers resonated with the student engagement profiles of the Whizz, the Worrier and the Worker. Teachers and researchers could see how students clustered into these categories at different times during the task and how elements from all three are essential in educating future data scientists.

The next steps are for Pymble’s Data Science students to go ‘behind the scenes’ with the UTS team as they learn more about the technology and how research is utilised. 

And as great research results, it produced more questions and tangents of inquiry we may wish to pursue!