With the circumstances surrounding the global pandemic influencing enrollment and engagement in the MOOC, we were interested in whether its impact would also be realized in topics learners chose for their final projects. Furthermore, we were interested in the specific problems that learners identified related to the pandemic which they deemed “solvable” using computational thinking approaches.
Methods for Identifying Projects Related to the Pandemic
In order to accurately measure the number of final projects submitted and those related to the COVID-19 pandemic, we first used a series of Jupyter Notebooks to clean the data. We discarded a total of 61 projects that were missing attachments, were exact duplicates of previously submitted projects, or skipped by peer reviewers due to incomplete submissions. This left us with 164 final projects to analyze, submitted between November 18, 2019 (course launch date) and August 11, 2020.
To identify projects related to the pandemic, we first extracted those that contained any of the following words in their title or description: COVID, corona, virus, pandemic, epidemic, Wuhan, and social distanc(e). We then performed the same search through all PDF, DOCX, and PPTX project attachments. In total, we found 32 final projects that related to the events surrounding the pandemic.