SKETCH WORKSHEETS: A SKETCH-BASED EDUCATIONAL SOFTWARE SYSTEM BUILT WITHIN COGSKETCH

Sketching is a valuable tool for learning in spatially rich domains like geoscience. However, providing students with timely feedback on their sketches is very time-consuming. The purpose of sketch worksheets is to provide an environment for students to complete sketching exercises and to receive automatic, on-demand feedback from the software. To achieve this, we use CogSketch, our sketch understanding software platform, which uses artificial intelligence techniques to capture the conceptual and spatial information depicted in the sketch. When a worksheet is first developed, a worksheet author sketches an ideal solution to a problem and defines correctness criteria for that problem. When a student uses a worksheet, they draw their candidate solution directly into the software and can request feedback at any time. The feedback mechanism uses a computational model of analogy to automatically find qualitative differences between the student sketch and the solution. These differences, along with the correctness criteria defined by the worksheet author, are used to provide the student with targeted feedback. Scoring utilities have also been built into the system to make assessment less time consuming for instructors. Sketch worksheets have been used in introductory undergraduate geoscience courses at Northwestern University and at Carleton College. The student worksheets from those activities have been used to improve spatial reasoning and feedback generation within the software. We have also worked closely with geoscience domain experts to make user interface improvements so that domain experts (especially instructors) can design their own sketch worksheets at scale. This presentation gives an overview of sketch worksheets, as well as our efforts to make it a useful tool for geoscience instructors.