Interactive digital assessment in mathematics Erasmus Project

Project Title

Interactive digital assessment in mathematics

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Partnerships for Digital Education Readiness

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2020

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Open and distance learning; Pedagogy and didactics; ICT – new technologies – digital competences

Project Summary

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.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 276470 Eur

Project Coordinator

NORGES TEKNISK-NATURVITENSKAPELIGE UNIVERSITET NTNU & Country: NO

Project Partners

• RUHR-UNIVERSITAET BOCHUM
• THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH
• FRIEDRICH-ALEXANDER-UNIVERSITÄT ERLANGEN-NÜRNBERG
• UNIVERSITAET BAYREUTH