Re: [Tuxmath-devel] Personalized, adaptive game-play to improve learning in Tuxmath

[Tim H. <ho...@wu...>]

Hi Siddarth,

On Thursday, April 07, 2011 10:21:36 am Siddharth Kothari wrote:
> If the devs. of Tuxmath agree, I plan to submit a SoC proposal on the idea
> of providing "an adaptive game-play to improve learning" in Tuxmath under
> PSU <http://summer.cs.pdx.edu/ideas>. The reason for choosing PSU is that
> they focus on academic-oriented projects and consider how valuable the the
> project could be to the larger open source community.
> 
> *Short description*: Tux, of Math command is an open-source educational
> game for learning Mathematics. Since the game is quite popular and used by
> many schools, my idea focuses on improving the learning of a
> player/student by providing a personalized, adaptive game-play. This is
> done by modelling the student's knowledge state using a Bayesian network.
> This also helps a teacher/supervisor to be provided with a detailed
> assessment about a particular student's strengths and weaknesses in
> individual concepts (read lessons).

I think this is an interesting idea. Tuxmath currently has a form of 
"feedback," adjusting the comet speed depending on how the student has 
performed recently. But it is very primitive (I can say that because I wrote 
it myself :-) ). There is plenty of room for improvement, and the idea of 
using Bayesian methods has potential.

Currently, I think the general principle is that:
1. Adaptive mechanisms are desirable in the "training academy" lessons;
2. The arcade games are supposed to be an absolute scale, and so there should 
not be any mechanisms that adjust task difficulty. In principle, you could get 
around this by adjusting how tuxmath does scoring, but I would be very 
cautious about doing this until you have considerable confidence that you can 
measure performance accurately. So you would want to disable any fancy 
mechanisms in the arcade games.

Another thing you should know about is the tux4kids-admin project, which is 
designed to build infrastructure for teachers to use tux4kids in more of a 
"lesson" environment. I implemented a first stab at this, but it never got to 
the point of being very user-friendly. There has been a more recent effort at 
it, but I am not sure of its current status. But you may want to take a peek 
at that work to see how your thoughts might relate.

In any event, I like this general direction of investigation, but I cannot 
promise to be able to supply mentoring time---I haven't had time for tux4kids 
for far longer than I'd like, and so I won't make any promises.

Best,
--Tim