The LearnLab Summer School is an intensive 1-week course focused on creating technology-enhanced learning experiments and building intelligent tutoring systems. The summer school provides you with a conceptual background and considerable hands-on experience in designing, setting up, and running technology-enhanced learning experiments, as well as analyzing the data from those experiments in a technology supported manner. The summer school is organized into four parallel tracks: Building online courses with OLI (BOLI), Intelligent Tutor Systems development (ITS), Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL), and Educational Data Mining (EDM).

I participated in the EDM track and took part in several lectures on Survival Analysis in Intelligent Tutors, Intelligent Tutoring Systems, Bayesian Knowledge Tracing (BKT), Feature Engineering, and Machine Learning with Simulated Students. These lectures were presented by some of the top researchers and grad students in their field.

On the last day, student teams presented their accomplishments to the rest of the participants. My team’s presentation was titled, “Feature Generation and Prediction: An Iterative Process”. We analyzed process data from a computer-based game focused on learning decimals. In this data set, there were few content variables but many more computer-tracked variables, such as time and number of attempts. For this reason, we used a tool to automate feature engineering, called “Featuretools”. The variables generated from this tool were used to predict enjoyment and percent correct rate for the steps per question in the game. In our project, we showed that the initial features generated performed well in predicting these two outcome variables and that future steps would utilize pruning and generation of new features until a “complete” set of features was found.

Having the opportunity to learn from, work with, and get hands-on experience from others in the EDM field was a great experience. I learned a lot and received some insight into how to incorporate the new skills I learned into my dissertation topic.