A natural interaction reasoning system for electronic circuit analysis in an educational setting

Abstract

This thesis presents a sketch-based interaction system that can be used to illustrate the process of reasoning about an electrical circuit in an educational setting. Recognition of hand-drawn shapes is accomplished in a two stage process where strokes are first processed into primitives like lines or ellipses, then combined into the appropriate circuit device symbols using a shape description language called LADDER. The circuit is then solved by a constraint-propagation reasoning component. The solution is shown to the user along with the justifications that support each deduction. The level of detail and the speed of the solution playback can be customized to tailor to a student's particular learning pace. A small user study was conducted to test the performance of the recognition component, which revealed several recognition problems common to almost all of the users' experiences with the system. Suggestions for dealing with these problems are also presented.