# Using LSTM to Identify Help Needs in Primary School Scratch Students
## 2 Materials and Methods
### User Experience with Scratch  
The purpose of the user experience is to collect data to assist in the development of an intelligent model for identifying, through the use of machine learning techniques and the block-based programming language distance calculation, when a primary school student has need of pedagogical assistance. Since our ultimate goal is to help elementary students in a real learning environment while performing Scratch exercises, the data collection must be done in a real learning environment. To this end, we reached a collaboration agreement with two learning centers, and chose 10 Scratch exercises, designed and validated by primary school technology teachers, of varying degrees of difficulty for students to perform, with the goal of learning the basics of programming and computational thinking. The realization of the user experiences took a total of three months, and a total of four teachers specialized in teaching technology to primary school students participated in them. Since not all students have the same knowledge of Scratch, they will need help at different points of the process, so the model must be customized according to the knowledge level. To evaluate this, we also designed three level assessments, also of varying degrees of difficulty, that must be completed prior to executing the aforementioned exercises. These assessments measure the student's prior knowledge of Scratch. The students who participated in these user experiences were very aware that during the experiment they should ask for help only when they needed it. In order for students to be able to ask for help, and for this request to be recorded in the database, modifications were made to the Scratch project to enable a button for students to ask for help and to display hints about the exercise they were currently working on. In order to clarify the procedure of the sessions, an explanatory session was held prior to the user experiences to explain the purpose of the research and the importance of requesting help when it was really needed. In addition, the teachers supervised the development of these experiences and also validated the students' requests for help. As described in Section 2.1, the application of AI ethical principles must play a central role in education. In this study, in addition to building a model capable of identifying when a student needs help, we relied on ethical methods. In user experiences, two of the most critical ethical elements are biases (discrimination by gender and by minority groups), and transparency. To avoid any bias due to gender or minority status, participation in user experiences was offered to any elementary school student in the collaborating centers, without any kind of discrimination based on gender, race, or social group. Despite this, we are aware that given the low number of participants in the user experiences, there is no equity in the representation of different races, social groups, or minority groups. In this study we have just focused on gender, trying to ensure that both genders are represented as equally as possible. In addition, to provide maximum transparency, parents or legal guardians and students who wanted to participate in the experiences received an informed consent form that included a description of the benefits of the study and its possible benefits and risks for the student, a detailed description of the study itself and of the data protection policy, and finally a channel through which to ask questions. Parents or legal guardians can request at any time the withdrawal of a student from the experience, as well as the desire to keep or delete the data already collected. Likewise, a certificate was provided by the Research Ethics Committee of the UNED. In the case of this research, the Research Ethics Committee of the UNED required the declaration of a \"data treatment activity\", which in our case referred to the automated treatment of academic data of individuals under the age of 14.