| In many subjects students have to acquire procedural skills. Problems in mathematics are often solved using a standard procedure, such as for example solving a system of linear equations by subtracting equations from top to bottom, and then substituting variables from bottom to top. Problems in computer science, physics, chemistry, electrotechnics, and other subjects, often require procedural skills as well. Furthermore, procedural skills appear at any educational level. E-learning systems offer excellent possibilities for practicing procedural skills. The first explanations and motivation for a procedure that solves a particular kind of problems are probably best taught in a class room, or studied in a book, but the subsequent practice can often be done behind a computer. There exist many e-learning systems or intelligent tutoring systems that support practicing procedural skills. The tools vary widely in breadth, depth, user-interface, etc, but, unfortunately, almost all of them lack sophisticated techniques for providing immediate feedback. If feedback mechanisms are present, they are hard coded in the tools, often even with the exercises. This situation hampers the usage of e-learning systems for practicing procedural skills. This project aims to investigate techniques for providing flexible and immediate feedback in tools that support practicing procedural skills. We want to use advanced techniques from computer science, taken from fields such as term rewriting, strategies, error-correcting parsers, and generic programming to provide feedback at each intermediate step from the start towards the solution of an exercise. We want to further develop some of these techniques, and apply and experiment with them in the domain of e-learning systems. Our goal is to obtain e-learning systems that give immediate and useful feedback. |
