Group Meeting March 16, 2007

Presentation 1: Danielle

Title: Learning SQL with a computerized Tutor

Danielle presented projects related to SQL tutorial which is a new project for several members of the group. The main goal of the project is developing a personalized SQL tutorial using different techniques from adaptive hypermedia.

Danielle presented an existing SQL tutor which is developed by University of Canterbury which is designed to address students’ problems regarding to learning SQL such as problem to memorize database schemas, or misconceptions in students' understanding of the elements of SQL. The tutor tries to provide useful hints and helps when students make any error regarding a specific SQL command instead of general messages that are hard for students to understand.

Danielle provided a demo of the SQL tutorial from University of Canterbury in which students get a SQL question and have to fill out empty boxes. While working on the problem, students can ask for different kind of hints and helps.

We had a discussion about the difference of “bug model” and model of students’ evaluation. Basically, bug model is the model of students’ misconceptions while evaluation model deals with students’ evaluations of their responses to a problem.

Peter also described briefly about the new SQL project which will be similar to our C project but for Databases. It means the system will have different components such as quizzes, examples, and script based evaluation. It also includes components developed in different places and the main challenge of the project is a meaningful integration of the components and a design of a centralized user model that communicates with all the components. So in this SQL system, the teacher will be able to structure the course and assigns activities to each lecture. Every link in the system will provide guidance and the guidance can be social or knowledge based.

Presentation 2: Sharon

Sharon presented her example authoring system. The system is a community based example authoring in a way that the teacher puts the example into the system but then every line of the example will get annotated by the students. Students are doing the annotations as an educational activity. They are also able to criticize annotations of other students. In the current design, once a student start annotating an example, it will be locked for that student and other student can only rate the annotations. This might be changed in later design.

Sharon is planning to finish the implementation as soon as possible to run the first study which will be done in a classroom with 9 students. The study will allow half of the examples to go through two rounds of annotation and ratings and the other half through only one round of annotations and ratings. At the end an expert will evaluate all the annotations and ratings. This part is only for the purpose of the study and evaluation.

In longer term the project will let use to provide guidance on open core examples since the content of the examples are not enough for providing the guidance but added annotation can help to provide guidance or even provide better search for the examples.