David Vella’s Updates

ActiveMath

ActiveMath is a web-based intelligent tutoring system for mathematics. ActiveMath offers unique workshops which are all hands-on, real-world mathematics ideal for both regular and special needs students. The goal in all of their workshop demonstrates why mathematics is important and how it is used.They offer quite a different range of workshops “Math at the Art Institute,” “Outdoor Mathematics,” and “Probabilities in Gaming” being the most unique.

ActiveMath is an Intelligent tutoring systems. Intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs) have been researched in AI now for several years. With the enormous development and increasing availability of the Internet, the application of web-based learning systems becomes more likely and realistic and research for intelligent features receives more attention than before.

As a result, a number of new Intelligent tutoring systems have been developed over the last five years, among them ActiveMath, a web-based, adaptive learning environment for mathematics.


These systems strive for improving long-distance learning, for complementing
traditional classroom teaching, and for supporting individual and life-long
learning. Web-based systems are available on central servers and allow a user to learn in their own environment and whenever it is appropriate for them.

Intelligent tutoring systems are a great field of application for AI-techniques.

In a nutshell, ActiveMath has used and further developed results in:

  • problem solving
  • rule-based systems
  • knowledge representation
  • user modeling 
  • adaptive systems and adaptive hyper-media
  • diagnosis.

ActiveMath’ design aims at supporting truly interactive, exploratory learning
and assumes the student to be responsible for their learning to some extent.

Therefore, a relative freedom for navigating through a course and for learning
choices is given and by default, the student model is scrutable, i.e., inspectable and modifiable. Moreover, dependencies of learning objects can be inspected in a dictionary to help the student to learn the overall picture of a domain (e.g., analysis) and also the dependencies of concepts.


Several dimensions of adaptivity to the student and her learning context
improve the learner’s motivation and performance. Most previous intelligent tutor systems did not rely on an adaptive choice of content. A reason might be
that the envisioned use was mostly in schools, where traditionally every student learns the same concepts for the same use. In colleges and universities, however, the same subject is already taught differently for different groups of users and in different contexts, e.g., statistics has to be taught differently for students of mathematics, for economics, or medicine.

Therefore, the adaptive choice of content to be presented as well as examples and exercises is pivotal. In addition, an adaptation of examples and exercises to the student’s capabilities is highly desirable in order to keep the learner in the zone of proximal development rather than overtax or undertax her.
Moreover, web-based systems can be used in several learning contexts, e.g.,
long-distance learning, homework, and teacher-assisted learning.

Personalization is required in all of them because even for teacher-assisted learning in a computerfree classroom with, say, 30 students and one teacher individualized learning is impossible. ActiveMath’s current version provides adaptive content, adaptive presentation features, and adaptive appearance.