Curiosity Notebook: The Design of a Research Platform for Learning by Teaching

TL;DR

The paper presents the Curiosity Notebook, a web-based platform designed to facilitate and study learning by teaching through interactions with teachable agents in diverse educational settings.

Contribution

It introduces a novel research infrastructure for studying learning by teaching, detailing its design, evolution, and validation through multiple empirical studies.

Findings

Demonstrated platform's utility in diverse learning environments

Validated features essential for studying learning by teaching

Provided insights into learning phenomena via empirical data

Abstract

While learning by teaching is a popular pedagogical technique, it is a learning phenomenon that is difficult to study due to variability in the tutor-tutee pairings and learning environments. In this paper, we introduce the Curiosity Notebook, a web-based research infrastructure for studying learning by teaching via the use of a teachable agent. We describe and provide rationale for the set of features that are essential for such a research infrastructure, outline how these features have evolved over two design iterations of the Curiosity Notebook and through two studies -- a 4-week field study with 12 elementary school students interacting with a NAO robot and an hour-long online observational study with 41 university students interacting with an agent -- demonstrate the utility of our platform for making observations of learning-by-teaching phenomena in diverse learning environments. Based on these findings, we conclude the paper by reflecting on our design evolution and envisioning future iterations of the Curiosity Notebook.