Explaining Engagement: Learner Behaviors in a Virtual Coding Camp.

Engagement is critical to learning, yet current research rarely explores its underlying contextual influences, such as differences across modalities and tasks. Accordingly we examine how patterns of behavioral engagement manifest in a diverse group of ten middle school girls participating in a synchronous virtual computer science camp. We form multimodal measures of behavioral engagement from learner chats and speech. We found that the function of modalities varies, and chats are useful for short responses, whereas speech is better for elaboration. We discuss implications of our work for the design of intelligent systems that support online educational experiences.