Abstract
With the rise in classroom populations—in both physical classrooms and online learning environments such as massively open online courses—instructors are struggling to provide relevant and personalized feedback on student work. As a result, many instructors choose to structure their homework assignments and assessments via multiple-choice questions or other more automatable techniques, rather than assign complete problems and diagrams. In this work, we aim to provide a new solution to the instructors of introductory engineering courses. We leveraged the power of sketch-recognition and artificial intelligence to create Mechanix, a sketch-based system that tutors students through drawing and solving free-body diagrams. Mechanix can support problems that have only a single answer, as well as questions for which many answers might apply (i.e. design this vs. solve this).
Over the last 3 years, besides deploying Mechanix in multiple classrooms at three different universities, we have presented the system to over 150 high school and university teachers, where they themselves stepped through the problems as a student would. This paper summarizes the system that was tested by multiple educators during the 2012 ASEE Workshop, the 2014 TAMU Teacher’s Summit, and the You-Try-It Strand during WIPTTE 2014. We found that even physics teachers could use a reminder of the concepts, and by changing our first problem set to be a tutorial of the concepts, the teachers were much happier with the software and able to solve the problems much more quickly.
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References
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Acknowledgments
The authors thank the many other contributors to Mechanix, specifically Hong-Hoe Kim, David Turner, Chris Aikens, Kourtney Kebodeaux, Francisco Vides, and Martin Field, as well as other members of the Sketch Recognition Lab and the IDREEM Lab (Innovation, Design Reasoning, Engineering Education and Methods Lab). This research is funded in part by Google and the National Science Foundation under Grant Nos. 0935219, 0942400 and 1129525.
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Valentine, S., Lara-Garduno, R., Linsey, J., Hammond, T. (2015). Mechanix: A Sketch-Based Tutoring System that Automatically Corrects Hand-Sketched Statics Homework. In: Hammond, T., Valentine, S., Adler, A., Payton, M. (eds) The Impact of Pen and Touch Technology on Education. Human–Computer Interaction Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-15594-4_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-15594-4_9
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