The project is aimed at development of a) digital tools that assess competencies within science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), particularly mathematical sciences and b) digital assignments within several specific mathematical subjects at the partner institutions. Keeping in mind complexity of the mathematical language, it is not an easy task to develop a digital teaching and assessment system that would fully guide and assess student's skills in mathematics. However, substantial work is done in the context of STACK (the System for Teaching and Assessment using a Computer algebra Kernel). STACK is based on over a fifteen years of research and development at several European institutions. One of the most important features of the STACK system is a possibility for differentiated feedback, such that different students get different response, depending on their answers. This project will promote and facilitate further development of STACK as a learning assistant tool in mathematics. In the framework of the current application, we divide development into software development work packages and pedagogic development work packages. Software development will consist of programming of several features aiming at higher interactivity, and pedagogic development will focus on construction of interactive exercise sets in at least two of mathematical subjects that are present at each of the partner institutions. As though STACK supports having a same question in several languages, this feature needs to and will be thoroughly tested in the project. Pedagogical work packages aim at development of problem sets in two focus areas within university mathematics: 1) Fundamentals of Algebra and Calculus and 2) Multivariate analysis. All partner institutions have students that study in these areas, as though specific names of the courses may differ. Main target group is engineering students. Programming work packages aim at software development in two focus areas: 1) interactive lightweight graphics in STACK, both 2D and 3D, and 2) Interactive adaptive questions in STACK. Besides these goals, the project aims at expanding the community that works on digital assessment in mathematics. This will be achieved primarily by involving more faculty members within partner institutions into project-related activities, such as local seminars and online experience sharing. In addition, the documentation of STACK and related plugins will be critically reviewed, thus making the system more accessible outside of participating organizations. Construction and programming of digital exercise sets is a very time-consuming activity that requires both pedagogical skills and to some extent programming skills. The activity comes on top on acute restructuring of education due to COVID-19 crisis. This makes it necessary to join all available resources, whether nationally or internationally. All five project partners are established universities with strong programs in engineering education. All partners have previously piloted different approaches within digital assessment in mathematics, and want to collaborate on a larger common solution. All developed software and questions sets will be released under open licenses, allowing free use in other educational institutions and countries, thus bringing added value at EU level.
The objectives can be roughly divided into pedagogical and technical. The former ones were aimed at designing a set of mathematical problems suitable for digital assessment and allowing for constructive automated feedback on student’s solutions. The scope was restricted to the first and second year courses in Mathematics for Engineering sciences. The technical objectives included software development allowing for assessment of certain mathematical properties of the student’s answers, and automated guiding of those learners who are slightly stuck. In addition, the support for graphical representations of mathematical objects was going to to be improved (2D) or developed from scratch (3D). Both development directions were planned to be intertwined, and a thorough documentation was to be constructed such that new educators would face a minimum number of challenges in employing project materials. In addition, we wanted to build a community of people working with digital assessment in mathematical sciences, and exchange ideas.
All project partners are higher education institutions that offer study programs in Engineering. Traditionally, such study programs involve hundreds of students and few staff members. This means that available in-person contact time per student is limited, and this specifically applies to mathematics courses that are taught for many engineering directions together. The situation became even worse with the start of the covid-19 pandemic, and most of the education becoming purely digital. As coronavirus emerged, it became clear that higher education institutions need proper digital assessment tools to ensure that students do make some or at least any progress while sitting alone without direct contact with peers or teaching staff. While certain commercial tools were available on the market, none was perfect for the field of mathematics. In addition, the academic communities prefer free open-source solutions such that the whole academic sector can freely benefit from the development. The current project aimed at both pedagogical and technical development of an open-source interactive assessment system, suitable to use in mathematical subjects, with special focus on interactivity and constructive feedback.