COGSKETCH: SKETCH UNDERSTANDING FOR GEOSCIENCE EDUCATION

Sketching is an important way for students to learn, and for instructors to assess their learning. Imagine software that gives students feedback on their sketches, based on instructor-authored guidelines, and provides feedback to instructors on how well students are doing. CogSketch, being developed by the Spatial Intelligence and Learning Center, is aimed at doing this. This talk will summarize CogSketch, its potential for assessment and tutoring in geoscience, and how you might help make it happen.

CogSketch enables people to draw elements of a sketch and tell it what they mean directly, instead of relying on error-prone recognition technologies that do not fit the constraints of sketching in geoscience. CogSketch creates human-like representations of what is drawn, using visual analysis, spatial reasoning, and conceptual knowledge and analogical reasoning. The goal is for CogSketch to see student’s sketches in ways similar to the ways that we see them.

Sketching using digital ink provides unique opportunities for assessment. We will describe an experiment which shows that the content of student sketches, even in copying or tracing, provides indicators of expertise. Because CogSketch records timing data, the order in which items are drawn is easily examined, providing another source of evidence about expertise.

One of the models we are developing for education, worksheets, provides feedback to students by comparing a student’s sketch with an instructor’s sketch. The instructor’s sketch is annotated with what facts and relationships are important, and what advice to give if important relationships do not hold, using a graphical authoring environment. Analogical reasoning is used to provide feedback to students, using the comparison plus these annotations. We are working with geoscience instructors to develop an initial set of worksheets and test them in classroom settings.

CogSketch is publically available, at http://www.spatiallearning.org/projects/cogsketch_index.html. We invite you to download it and try it out. It is still a work in progress, which means that your feedback will help guide its development.