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Entwine Study FAQ

We are seeking Letters of Support from rural school districts.
We are NOT recruiting for our study until funded.

 

Can I test out Entwine before deciding?

This grant is to provide the funding to create Entwine. It does not yet exist, so you will not be able to test it out. However, our curriculum, Scratch Encore, is freely available, so you are welcome to see what the curriculum entails. The funding will allow us to add a rural strand. Please do not distribute the Scratch Encore link - if you are distributing a link, distribute this one that asks people to register first so we can track usage.

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How many teachers and how many years?

At a state level, we are seeking 1-2 teachers in year 1 (2022-23) during design, 5-10 teachers in years 2 and 3 (2023-25), during pilot studies and 25 teachers in year 4 (2025-26) during the large evaluation. These can be the same or different teachers in each year. These will presumably be drawn from several districts throughout the state, so we would not expect all teachers to come from a single district.  With the LEA, you are committing to allowing us to recruit - you are not committing to a certain number of teachers.

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What is the time commitment each year?

In year 1, the teachers would participate in one interview and one focus group to provide us insight into their district interests / constraints as well as interests of their students. If they know Scratch or were able to attend our PD, they would have students complete a single project, from which we would get ideas of their interests. Teachers would handle distributing and collecting consent forms from students. We will collect all data through our system.

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In years 2 and 3, pilot teachers would teach a minimum of 16 hours of instruction (4 modules) + two days of assessment (pre- and post-).  However, we have more modules for teachers who would like a longer curriculum (we recommend 6 modules). Teachers would handle distributing and collecting consent forms from students. Teachers would also participate in one interview during the middle and one focus group at the end to provide feedback.

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In year 4, evaluation teachers would teach a minimum of 16 hours of instruction (4 modules) + two days of assessment (pre- and post-).  However, we have more modules for teachers who would like a longer curriculum (we recommend 6 modules). Teachers would handle distributing and collecting consent forms from students. 

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What if some teachers want to use the system, but they do not want to be in the study or their district will not allow them to be in the study?

Those classrooms are welcome to use our curriculum with the traditional Scratch setup, but only study participants will be able to use the online integrated system for free. There are two reasons for this. First, it is a pilot system, so we need to limit the users and collect data from most of them so that we can improve the system. Second, the servers cost us money, so we cannot provide them to an unbounded number of classrooms. We will figure out the costs to us per student during the study and offer them at cost to any who want to use them.

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Are there formative and summative assessments?

We have assessments embedded into our curriculum. We will also be developing pre- and post- assessments for modules 1-4 for the purposes of our study. You are welcome to use the module assessments if you wish (but are not required). Scratch Encore is freely available, so you are welcome to peek at all of the modules.

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How secure and private is the data?

The original impetus around creating Entwine was to provide a system that adheres to SOPPA. We will allow the teacher to choose the level of privacy - only teacher sees the projects, only teacher and classmates, or only teacher, classmates, and partner classrooms.

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What platforms does Entwine work on?

Entwine works on the same platforms as Scratch works on. The only popular platform that is a poor fit is iPad because it does not have a keyboard, removing the ability to use "When key pressed" events. Small screens may be an issue with the integrated environment - it is not built yet, so we have not tested it yet.

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Will teachers be compensated? When will they get paid?

Teachers will be compensated for their time in professional development and for classroom-level communication, distribution, and collection of consent forms. They will get paid each year at the conclusion of that year's study activities.

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