[Sugar-devel] Assessment in Karma

[Bryan Berry]

On Wed, 2009-07-29 at 12:01 +0200, NoiseEHC wrote:
> 1. Karma could measure the time it takes to finish a task in a
> compound exercise. If it is statistically relevant then it could give
> some hint to the teacher which parts of the curriculum are hard for
> the given child. If I will be able to persuade the headmaster then
> there will be research (hard data) which hopefully will find out
> whether this measurement is meaningful or pointless.

But also, the children should speed up over time doing certain times of
exercises.  For example, we found that kids were counting on their
fingers instead of inside their heads during an adding game until we put
a timer on it. 

I think measuring how long something takes is useful in a variety of
circumstances.

great point

ChristophD, we really need to talk to sunil and kamana about assessment
as they probably have a lot of good ideas. Well, actually they created
all the assessments for EPaath but we need to abstract their work to
something broadly usable.


> 2. There is a VERY HARD to develop exercise model where the child can
> follow multiple paths to the solution. In this case the possible
> choices the child can follow makes a graph with most of the leaves
> ending with "does not compute". If this exercise model proves to be
> useful (which will be determined in the mentioned research) then Karma
> should store the way the child solved the exercise and not only the
> end result. So what I wanted to say is that it is possible that the
> wrong steps can give more informations to the teacher about the
> knowledge of the child than the fact whether the child was able to
> solve the exercise or not.
> Because the 2. point can be a little bit hard to understand, here is
> an example:
> The problem is this: "If we used A amount of paint to fully paint a
> little picture with sides B and C, how much paint do we need to fully
> paint a room with sides D, E and height F?"
> This is an exercise with 3 steps. The child has to calculate the area
> of the picture (P=BxC) and the walls' (W=(D+E)*F*2) and has to
> calculate A/P*W.
> Now the graph looks something like this: from the beginning the child
> can calculate either area or can do something like B*E which "does not
> compute". If he has P and W then he can do either A/P or W/P then
> either A/P*W or W/P*A respectively. In every step the program should
> graphically show what the child just have calculated (what can be
> impossible if he uses D*E*F*B for example).
> 
> Now I do not insist that you develop this 2. point since it is a HUGE
> task (and needs some research to know whether it really help children
> understand complex relationships) but moving Karma into this direction
> (just a little bit) would help a lot if the headmaster would decide to
> do this research. In this case we will translate the resulting
> exercises to English, probably you will be interested in that.

Sounds like a hard but worthwhile task



> ps:
> I intend to use Karma for interactive curriculum development for
> reasons Bryan Berry talked about a lot.

Awesome! How can we involve you more? is it time to for us to open a
mailing list specific to karma?  like  sugar-karma at l.s.o ?

u can find christoph, myself, and the ole nepal team on #olenepal or
#sugar Mon-Fri  03:00 -- 11:00 GMT (day time hours in Nepal)


> ps2:
> By research I mean "try out with kids while somebody from the
> University measures the outcome".



-- 
Bryan W. Berry
Technology Director
OLE Nepal, http://www.olenepal.org