Process Group 14

Return PRE2017 3 Groep14

Concept 1: Intelligent Quiz Master

Subject

Fun Learning for Kids Enhance knowledge levels of young children through an interactive quiz system. Teachers will be able to tell the system the desired final knowledge level and will be able to see the progress of each child. We want to implement this in a smart home or in a robot. Furthermore the system has to be able to interact with the children and assess their knowledge levels to create questions on their personal level. In our project we will focus on the quiz and try to create this.

Users

• Children from class 3 - 4 in the Netherlands. The system could later on be changed to fit other age groups that have other knowledge levels, but for this project we focus on this group as the simple math they need to learn here are an easy starting point for the program.
• Parents or guardians of these children as they want to know the progress their child or children has made.
• Teachers that can tell the systems what level of knowledge the entire class needs to reach at the end. They also need to be able to see how far each student has gotten.

User Requirements

children:

• learning through a fun program
• competitive, want the highest reward (number of sheep)

parents:

• want their children to study properly
• want their children to be happy
• want their children to be motivated/interested
• want to have more free time as they do not have to tutor as much anymore
• want to check their children's progress

teachers:

• let the students learn effectively
• the system has to match the curriculum
• easier to check all students' progress

Objective

Develop a smart quiz program for on a computer/tablet/laptop that can assess knowledge levels of its users and ask questions on their personal boundary so they learn effectively.

Approach

Creating the smart quiz and interface in java.

Intelligent Quiz Master

Idea. Use a set of arithmic questions (addition, subtraction, fractions) since then it is easy for us to check if it makes sense. Also, since most children have difficulties with arithmic this is actually useful.

Given a set of questions, the quiz master will test the knowledge of a child, and help the child improve by asking the right questions at the right time. We will build an application that selects the next question to ask the child, based on the previous answers the child gave to previous questions. The quiz will find the knowledge level of the child and ask questions at the child's knowledge boundary so he can still learn from the question but will not be overwhelmed.

The quiz master has to:

• Find out the level of knowledge the child has, and ask questions that are on the 'edge' of a childs knowledge in order to improve their knowledge.
• Optionally invent new questions, similar to the already existing questions.

In order to do so, we must:

• Define distance (or question similarity) between questions, which questions are of similar difficulty. So cluster questions based on their difficulty. Note that this will vary per child.
• Simulate the (increasing/decreasing) knowledge of different children. (To be able to train our app.)
• Construct a (large enough) data set to use parts of it for training and validation.
• Find out what the next right question would be. Our app should do this, based on the question similarity for a certain child. Educational/psychological: what are the best questions to ask?

Milestones

• Finishing planning
• Summarizing SotA
• Quiz
  • Teacher can enter category and boundary (knowledge goal that has to be reached)
  • Quiz can generate questions inside category
  • Quiz can understand the person's input
  • Quiz uses input to generate personal level questions
  • Quiz gives results
• Interface
  • Results are displayed to child/parent/teacher (they each have their own interface)
  • Reward system (for the child, parents can see this as well)

Deliverables

Smart quiz program including interfaces for the child who will use the quiz to learn, the parents and the teacher.

State of the Art Literature Study

State of the Art Literature Study

Development

UML for Quiz

• This includes the categories and how we plan to make it smart.

Clustering

• Knewton the following things can be concluded:
• Dividing the class in smaller groups in class 3 has a positive effect on the performances of the children, because more interaction is observed.
• More than 90 percent of the elementary school teachers uses computers when teachers. According to them, using ICT can contribute to more efficient, more effective, and more attractive education.

In the book, het didactische werkvormenboek , the following important aspects of teaching are mentioned:

• The best way for children to take in information is by reading and by looking.
• When asking questions there have to be open answer questions and closed answer questions.
• Children have to work both in a classroom setting as well as in smaller groups and/or individual.
• Switching between these types of working works favorable for learning information. For example switching between games and practicing.

For our project we chose a traditional education system as described in the before mentioned book, what this would entail is the following:

• Teachers primarily decide the curriculum and the order in which things are learned/taught.
• The focus lies on transferring knowledge and skills in a classroom setting.
• There is a curriculum in which certain subjects and fields are central.
• Learning is an individual activity.
• The children’s performances are measured using tests.

Additionally to this we want to focus on making the program inviting to children.

The following article shows us that the common education system does not seem to relate to the natural, experimental learning process of children. In games it is possible to learn in a natural way, which is exactly why using games could be relevant for elementary education. Of course, there should be a good balance between having fun and effectively learning, this way the advantages of playful learning will not get lost. The following things need to be kept in mind when asking questions:

• The information should not be presented in a way that is (too) abstract, it should speak to the children’s imaginations.
• There should be more repetition.
• Important information should be presented in more than one way.
• It should not happen too fast.
• When using characters, make sure they are realistic.
• Use animations, dialogues that are child friendly, interaction and direct feedback.
• Children should not be immediately punished for a mistake.

This is an article which is about a great example of playful learning. The focus lies on intrinsic motivation to do things that children can learn from, instead of sugar coating actual learning. It is a misunderstanding that people/children do not want to learn, it should, however, be because they want to themselves.

A detailed explanation about the Montessori didactic and its commonalities and differences with playful learning. This gives a lot of new insights in playful learning and how Montessori schools go about implementing this.

An article about using playful learning in a mobile game, could be interesting to our project as this is similar to what we hope to achieve. gaat over het design.

We can conclude from this that we want to focus on playful/fun learning in an app. We will do this by asking simple maths questions using fun pictures of opjects (animations if possible) this way we hope to intrinsically motivate the children to play with our app. Other things we will implement is that we want to make sure it will not go too fast and we can use child-friendly language.

As we have decided to go for a traditional learning strategy/didactic here is an article that explains this. In traditional education teachers especially need to be able to properly explain the curriculum, being able to guide the learning process of their pupils and to motivate them to learn.

Furthermore, in it says that: the traditional mathematics program (Reken Zeker) is available since august 2010 and is targeting group 3 up until group 8 from the elementary schools. Each learning year consists of nine blocks, each of four weeks, where two diagnostic tests are done in the fourth week. The first block is a rehearsal from the year before and is therefore optional. A characteristic from this program is the central place occupied by basic skills, in which automation, the stepwise practicing and rehearsing, and the usage of simplistic strategies form the main points. Usually, each lesson treats one basic skill, and there is a lot of individual practicing after a short instruction. In the higher years there are also a few other strategies offered, where children that are not that strong with mathematics can always return to the standard strategies, this is to keep them confident and satisfied as much as possible. Numbers are the focus point and language is not dominantly present, though some of the questions are context questions. Children that are good at mathematics can do extra assignments to gain more insights.

Questions

We want to have three types of questions:

• Counting the amount of sheep, pigs, cows, and chickens.
• Animals that carry a small schoolboard.
  • Field with x amount of random points, these points have to be placed in such a way that when an image appears they will not overlap.
• Timeline questions(If time allows it)

According to the following website students from our target audience can do the following things at the end of their years:

• Group three can add and subtract up until 20.
• Group four can add and subtract up until 100 and they can do basic multiplications.

Because of this we want to make the program in such a way that the teachers can enter the settings according to the current group of children. The teacher can chose between addition, subtraction, multiplication or division on a rande [x,y] or a combination of these operations. Besides this, the teacher can input the maximal amount of arguments in each questions, how many questions there are in a session, whether the numbers have to be integers or decimals, and whether or not the test should automatically go to the next question or manually.