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

[Caroline F. <car...@gm...>]

I thought we didn't make the summer of code this year?

Caroline

Sent from a mobile device.

On 7 Apr 2011, at 16:44, Tim Holy <ho...@wu...> wrote:

> 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
> 
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