Automated math exercises
On May 15, ETH Zurich will honor particularly innovative teaching projects with the KITE Award for the fifth time. In a short series, we present the three projects that made it to the final.
Hundreds of ETH students attend lectures on the basics of mathematics every year. And these - for example integrating - often have to be practiced a lot before they can be mastered.
The two mathematics lecturers Meike Akveld and Andreas Steiger have therefore developed automated exercise sequences. Students can use these to solve as many exercises as they want, whenever they want, and immediately receive differentiated feedback.
This is possible thanks to a computer algebra system that can be used to assess and evaluate mathematical tasks. It is available as a question type called "STACK" on the Moodle learning platform. Akveld and Steiger have developed a comprehensive collection of exercises based on this for their engineering analysis lectures.
In its assessment, the faculty conference praised the fact that the new form of teaching promotes independent, active learning as groundbreaking. In addition, the concept can be scaled up very well and transferred to other areas, which is crucial in view of the growth in student numbers at ETH.
Akveld and Steiger, together with their project collaborator George Ionita, have also developed the collection into an integral trainer. This allows students to practise the various techniques required for integration individually at first, with assistance in the form of hints or automated feedback. At the end, they are given more openness tasks in which they have to choose the right technique and then apply it.
In future, the system will also be used to carry out inspections. It has already been used successfully as a pilot. According to the creators, the amount of correction work has decreased significantly, while the quality of the tasks has remained high.
Register now for the KITE Award ceremony
The KITE Award will be presented as part of the Innovation in Learning and Teaching Fair on 15 May from 5 p.m., with speeches by Rector Günther Dissertori and Angela Owusu-Ansah, Provost of Ghana's Ashesi University.
The event combines the Learning and Teaching Fair, at which ETH lecturers exchange innovative teaching projects and ideas, and the KITE Award, with which the faculty conference honors particularly convincing teaching innovations every two years.
KITE Award, information and registration
All projects of the Innovation in Learning and Teaching Fair
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