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Brick: Mining Pedagogically Interesting Sequential Patterns

One of the goals of the SCY project (www.scy-net.eu) is to make (inquiry) learning environments adaptive. The idea is to develop “pedagogical agents” that monitor learner behaviour through the actions they perform and identify patterns that point to systematic behaviour, or lack thereof. To achieve these aims, it is necessary to develop methods to identify relevant patterns, and to associate these patterns with feedback to the learner. Here, we present a tool, called Brick, in which pedagogical researchers can interactively specify global patterns (e.g., “which actions occur between running a simulation and providing a correct answer”). The tool then responds with the matching sub-sequences in the data along with various metrics of interestingness (such as frequency and likelihood). Researchers can then determine which patterns are relevant to include in a pedagogical agent and how the agent should respond when a pattern occurs. We describe the tool, the pattern language and metrics used, and provide examples of applying these to log files of a simulation-based inquiry learning environment.