CSMCE and Physics and Astronomy Research Associate Professor Kevin Lee received an award in the amount of $10,000 from the University of Nebraska at Omaha for a project titled "UNO-NASA Space Grant: Sorting Tasks: Development and Evaluation of Authoring Tools and Curriculum."
This project will develop many examples of HTML5 animated sorting tasks as well as authoring tools for creating them. Both deliverables will be made publicly available on the University of Nebraska Astronomy Education website (https://astro.unl.edu). Sorting tasks ask students to drag-and-drop icons (which can be simple graphics or terms) and categorize them into descriptively labeled bins. Sorting tasks are ideal formative assessment tools for the 300,000 students who take an introductory astronomy course each year in the United States (and these tools have considerable utility in high school classes and outreach events as well). The tasks will function on all computer devices, but are targeted at smartphones which are incredibly abundant and beloved among today's college students. A student researcher will develop tasks and interview students asking them to solve tasks using a think-aloud protocol and use this information to refine the tasks and evaluate their impact.
Note: The authoring tools are now online.
Lee also was quoted in the USA Today story, "Fact check: Ample evidence the Earth is round and rotating, contrary to persistent social media claims," on Nov. 17. Read more at: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2022/11/17/fact-check-ample-evidence-earth-round-and-rotating/8267678001/