Toward facilitating assistance to students attempting engineering design problems

Abstract

In engineering design courses, many problems have a specification that the student's implementation must meet, but give the student a large range of freedom for the internal design of that implementation. There may be several distinct, correct strategies for solving them, some of which may be unknown to the teaching staff or intelligent tutor designer. When a student is pursuing an unrecognized strategy and begins to struggle, staff may redirect them, costing unnecessary work, and automated hint generators may offer unhelpful feedback. We have taken a first step toward discovering these alternate correct strategies by visualizing many student solutions together, using dynamic and static features of these solutions, so that the teaching staff can understand the space of correct strategies. This approach has been applied to two domains: an online Matlab programming challenge and an undergraduate computer architecture course. We discuss these initial investigations and pose discussion questions to the community about potential enhancement and application of this analysis.