  Many of these challenges are won by neural network models created by
full-time artificial intelligence scientists. Due to this origin, they have a
black-box character that makes their use and application less clear to learning
scientists. We describe our experience with competition from the perspective of
educational data mining, a field founded in the learning sciences and connected
with roots in psychology and statistics. We describe our efforts from the
perspectives of learning scientists and the challenges to our methods, some
real and some imagined. We also discuss some basic results in the Kaggle system
and our thoughts on how those results may have been improved. Finally, we
describe how learner model predictions are used to make pedagogical decisions
for students. Their practical use entails a) model predictions and b) a
decision rule (based on the predictions). We point out how increased model
accuracy can be of limited practical utility, especially when paired with
simple decision rules and argue instead for the need to further investigate
optimal decision rules.
