Dashboard to evaluate student engagement with interactive simulations

Student engagement with interactive simulations is affected by the prompts and activities teachers choose to couple with such simulations. In this early work, we introduce a prototype dashboard to visualize and evaluate student engagement generated by activities that leverage interactive simulations. Engagement in this study is gauged by factors such as the time spent in the activity, the rate and pattern of clicks, and the simulation elements used by students. The dashboard employs several approaches to visualize student mouse activity data, displaying either individual student interactions or aggregated information of an entire group. To test the dashboard's usability, we evaluate student engagement resulting from a homework activity that focused on factors that affect stored energy in a capacitor and used the PhET simulation "Capacitor Lab: Basics". The results show that the dashboard's visualizations help provide a general idea of how students interact, describe their engagement, and are a promising tool for guiding activity design.