NLP LAB Contribution to State College Area School District CEEL (Community Education Extended Learning) Program

 The NLP Lab has joined the efforts of several EECS departments to contribute to the State College Area School District CEEL (Community Education Extended Learning) Program, an afterschool program with a focus on extending learning for students in grades K-5.  We contributed a CEEL unit called "Artificial Agents that Help Teachers Help Students in STEM Writing Activities." Our unit presents an introduction to the ideas motivating our new NSF Award, "Supporting Science Learning and Teaching in Middle School Classrooms through Automated Analysis of Students' Writing" (in collaboration with Sadhana Puntambekar, U Wis, Madison.  It explains why good science writing goes hand in hand with good science, why teachers and students struggle with science writing, and how NLP can help. It gives a simple introductory lesson in distributional semantics, with activities for the students. You can find our unit on the EECS CEEL page, which has a download link here.