Research with Dr. Luc Paquette at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
I am a computer science major beginning my senior year at Southwestern University this fall. I applied to DREU because I am interested in becoming a data scientist, data analyst, or researcher, and I wanted the opportunity to participate in faculty-led academic computing research with a mentor to better understand what graduate school and a career in this field might entail.
Luc Paquette is an associate professor in the Department of Curriculum & Instruction. He completed his PhD in computer science at the University of Sherbrooke, where he studied the design of knowledge representations for intelligent tutoring systems and the use of those representations to automatically generate pedagogical content. After his PhD, Professor Paquette worked as a post-doctoral research associate at Teachers College, Columbia University, where he used educational data mining and knowledge engineering techniques to study student behavior in digital learning environments.
I am assisting Dr. Paquette with his research on persistence in education. We are collecting data from a Minecraft server where student participants are introduced to computing concepts. The collected data focuses on each student's level of engagement as they create programs to guide the Barrel Bot through a series of obstacle courses. This analysis will help identify points of challenge and better understand how students persist or fail to persist when facing educational hurdles.
At the midpoint of the program, I reflected on my work preparing a SQL-to-Python data pipeline, learning to query the WHIMC database, and collaborating with the development team to support data collection and debugging.
In my final report, I detail the full scope of my DREU project, including contributions to data preparation, analysis, and tool development for the WHIMC BarrelBot learning environment. I reflect on what I learned about educational research and the challenges of analyzing student behavior in virtual spaces.