Tracking Representational Flexibility Development through Speech Data Mining

In this work-in-progress research we exploited and investigated a virtual reality (VR) based, flexibility learning environment (FLE) in which adolescents with autism use, customize, and design an assortment of simulation games that represent and exemplify the application of forces and Newton's laws of motion. The simulation/game modeling and making tasks acted as the primers of practicing and assessing representational flexibility in solving the engineering design problems with computational thinking. The participants' participation behaviors and verbal utterances during the intervention sessions have been archived via screen and webcam recordings. The current study findings indicated that two approaches of speech or text data mining, multi-label classification and similarity index, can act as the in-situ performance assessment methods to evaluate the representational flexibility development for engineering design and computational thinking of a heterogeneous learner group.