Supporting Teachers to Monitor Student’s Learning Progress in an Educational Environment With Robotics Activities

Educational robotics has proven its positive impact on the performances and attitudes of students. However, the educational environments that employ them rarely provide teachers with relevant information that can be used to make an effective monitoring of the student learning progress. To overcome these limitations, in this paper we present IDEE (Integrated Didactic Educational Environment), an educational environment for physics, that uses EV3 LEGO Mindstorms® educational kit as robotic component. To provide support to teachers, IDEE includes a dashboard that provides them with information about the students' learning process. This analysis is done by means of an Additive Factor Model (AFM). That is a well-known technique in the educational data mining research area. However, it has been usually employed to carry out analysis about students' performance data outside the system. This can be a burden for the teacher who, in most cases, is not an expert in data analysis. Our goal in this paper is to show how the coefficients of AFM provide valuable information to the teacher without requiring any deep expertise in data analysis. In addition, we show an improved version of the AFM that provides a deeper understanding about the students' learning process.