A friend of mine is carrying out research in classroom based e-assessment in developing countries such as Pakistan. The aim of the research is to assist primary school teachers with computer software that:

· Is aligned with the particular subject curriculum they follow in their schools.

· Provides pupils with challenges and interactive short quizzes and tests to take after completing a topic taught by the teacher in the classroom.

· Provides students with immediate and diagnostic feedback on their performance on each challenge or test they attempt.

· Helps teachers in identifying the individual pupils needing help in certain conceptual areas of the curriculum, in managing the overall classroom portfolio, and in assuring better teaching and learning within the socio-cultural context of their educational system.

You can help in two ways!

1. The project is still in the stage where available literature on formative e-assessment is being critically reviewed and any bright ideas relevant to the topic are welcome.

2. One very important aspect of the research is related to the kind of tools and technologies that should be utilized in developing the software product. This is done keeping into consideration the fact that the use of expensive tools, technologies and infrastructure does not help much in sustaining any change in the educational systems of developing countries. Therefore, Moodle (www.moodle.org) and other such open source learning management systems are being considered for the initial version of this project.

We need someone who can evaluate both Moodle and OpenMark, tell whether the functionality of diagnostic assessment used in OpenMark can also be integrated in Moodle, and how. Monetary remuneration is available for this activity.

The Open University (www.open.ac.uk) in the UK is one of the pioneers in establishing distance learning (also e-learning) programs for higher education. They are currently using OpenMark (https://openmark.dev.java.net/), their own open source Computer Assisted Assessment (CAA) system, as well as Moodle to develop formative assessment tests for their students enrolled in distance learning programs (http://labspace.open.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=3484&topic=all). You will find some documentation on this at http://labspace.open.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=3484&topic=all, and at http://labspace.open.ac.uk/mod/resource/view.php?id=381989&direct=1. After that we would need help in taking on the development of our own software from there.

If you know anyone who is interested, please leave a comment or drop an email to awais {at} chaoticity.com

I made a small 10 min demo to simulate the classic river crossing puzzle for teaching state space search in my AI class. I did exercise my right to be creative by changing the characters a bit. Jerry, Tom and Spike have to cross a river, going from the right side to left, in a boat. While you are in the boat, they behave. But as soon as you leave Tom with Jerry or Tom with Spike on one side WITHOUT the boat, they start fighting. Being a peace loving person, you don’t want that. The goal is to move them across the river with no fights. (as you may have noticed, there is no eating/killing involved in my version)

Here, we can represent each object by a Boolean variable and draw the states accordingly. The picture above can be represented by 1 0 1 0 where the left most 1 represents that the boat is on the left bank and the zero after that tells that Jerry is on right one. Similarly the next 1 and 0 denote Tom on the left bank and Spike on the right one respectively.Here is a link to the executable in case anyone wants to play it or give it to a kid to figure out. Drop me an email if you want the source code (C#). The executable requires an installation of the Microsoft .NET framework 3.5.

Download River Crossing Puzzle

Microsoft .NET framework 3.5

While preparing the first few lectures, I realized I needed a simulation of the 8 Queens Problem using Breadth First Search and Depth First Search. While there are many solutions on the Internet, I couldn’t find any program which lets me step through the algorithm. Besides, it had been a long time since  I did any programming in Windows.Forms so my code deprived fingers needed a sink.

So here’s my version of the 8 queens problem solver. Each board state is represented by a string. The string represent the columns starting from the left most column and the number in that position tells the row in which a queen is present.  The screenshot above thus represents the state 03142. The state 0314 would represent an empty column 4. You can download the compiled binary by clicking on the link below. I will try to upload the source once the assignment deadline has passed. It was developed in C# so you might have to install Microsoft .NET framework 3.5 to run this program. Comments/Suggestions/Bug Reports are welcome.

Download the 8 Queen Problem Solver

Its open for students as well as teachers and virtually anyone can create content to teach high school students. Some of the related videos can be viewed from MIT TechTV. If anyone is interested, he/she/it should drop Dr. Larson an email.