Online / 5 & 6 February 2022

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Class learning analytics with Raku

How Raku helps improve learning in a cloud computing class at the University of Granada


Rakulang is great not only as a scripting language, but also at the conceptual level, allowing you to map problem-domain concepts to data structures easily. This comes handy when you use a specific kind of learning procedure that needs to track general class progress as well as individual attainment levels in a very precise way. In this context, we have created a Raku mini-library and a series of scripts that give us information on how a whole class of Cloud Computing students is progressing, and allows to pinpoint choke points, hurdles to progress, as well as individuals who might have been left behind.

We think that teaching software engineering should be just like software engineering, and in this context we have created a class with project-based learning, and objective-based learning. Students progress asynchronously through a series of objectives, with the student giving them individualized feedback on how to achieve those objectives. Objectives fulfillment is public, and this gives us a storage platform on which to build a series of scripts that show us the general degree of attainment by the class, as well as how every individual students are doing. These scripts are, for the time being, run manually. In the near future they will be integrated in a learning analytics workfow using GitHub actions, reducing the amount of manual running as much as possible. This, while not using a big amount of high-magic, shows how Raku expresiveness and whippipitude make the management of class extremely easy.

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Photo of Juan Julián Merelo Juan Julián Merelo

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