| Summary: |
AGILMAT would give oportunity to continue and consolidate research work that has been carried out by the members of the team, independently or in collaboration, on the application of new technologies in education.
AGILMAT aims at the design and implementation of a system to automatically generate exercises of Mathematics, that must be versatile enough to cater for different stages and curricula.
There exist a huge number of courseware applications spread over the Web, namely tools to create and make available homework and assignments. All of them require from the teacher non-negligible effort specially to generate several instances of a given problem, which may not be easily recognized as simple variants of the same basic expression.
Many of the exercises of a certain grade may be actually solved successfully by some algebraic algorithmic procedures. The major idea of this project is therefore to analyse such algorithms in order to abstract and constrain the form of exercises that may be generated automatically. Not only the system shall generate drills of pedagogic interest, but it shall be used to provide illustrative examples, and in assessment.
The project consists of five major tasks:
- to collect problem templates for given topics and to describe their solving procedures;
- to abstract and obtain a formal representation of the problems that are to be tackled; to design parametric models for their generation with control on the difficulty level and adequacy for a given curriculum and student; to study decidability and complexity questions;
to define the architecture and to implement a prototype using constraint logic programming languages, though other platforms shall also be considered;
- to design different interfaces, for students and teachers, and to integrate the system in Web environments;
- to evaluate the project's impact and possible reusage of the results to develop similar tools for other subjects. |