Alexandros Papadimitriou

Interactive Problem Solving Support in the Adaptive Educational Hypermedia System MATHEMA

This paper describes the interactive problem solving support offered by our adaptive educational hypermedia system called MATHEMA. The general goal of the MATHEMA is the support of senior high school students or the beginners of higher education, through an interactive and constructivist environment, in learning physics (electromagnetism) individually and/or collaboratively, and to overcome their possible misconceptions and learning difficulties. Initially, a review of related work about the implemented AEHS/ITS and the didactic design principles of the MATHEMA are presented. Through the interactive problem solving, the system supports the students in solving electromagnetism problems, individually and/or collaboratively, by following an activity that is based on the experimentation with simulations, explorations, guided discovery, and collaboration didactic approaches. An experimental study with senior high school students showed that they improve their performances when following this activity. A questionnaire that we gave to the students to express their opinion about our system helped us to improve the quality of the courses.

MATHEMA: A Constructivist Enviroment for Electromagnetism Learning

In this paper we describe the Web-based adaptive educational hypermedia system called MATHEMA. In general, the MATHEMA is a learning system that dynamically generates courses in electromagnetism according to students’ learning goal, knowledge level, performance, learning style, abstract or concrete dimension of learning style, preference for visual and/or verbal feedback, preference for the kind of navigation, and preference of using or not the navigation guidance. The MATHEMA supports the following adaptive and intelligent techniques: curriculum sequencing, adaptive presentation, adaptive navigation support, interactive problem solving support, and adaptive group formation and peer help. Also, the MATHEMA supports meta-adaptation in the navigation of learners.