Stephanie Valentine

Sketch recognition algorithms for comparing complex and unpredictable shapes

In an introductory Engineering course with an annual enrollment of over 1000 students, a professor has little option but to rely on multiple choice exams for midterms and finals. Furthermore, the teaching assistants are too overloaded to give detailed feedback on submitted homework assignments. We introduce Mechanix, a computer-assisted tutoring system for engineering students. Mechanix uses recognition of freehand sketches to provide instant, detailed, and formative feedback as the student progresses through each homework assignment, quiz, or exam. Free sketch recognition techniques allow students to solve free-body diagram and static truss problems as if they were using a pen and paper. The same recognition algorithms enable professors to add new unique problems simply by sketching out the correct answer. Mechanix is able to ease the burden of grading so that instructors can assign more free response questions, which provide a better measure of student progress than multiple choice questions do.

Mechanix: A Sketch-Based Tutoring and Grading System for Free-Body Diagrams

Introductory engineering courses within large universities often have annual enrollments which can reach up to a thousand students. It is very challenging to achieve differentiated instruction in classrooms with class sizes and student diversity of such great magnitude. Professors can only assess whether students have mastered a concept by using multiple choice questions, while detailed homework assignments, such as planar truss diagrams, are rarely assigned because professors and teaching assistants would be too overburdened with grading to return assignments with valuable feedback in a timely manner. In this paper, we introduce Mechanix, a sketch-based deployed tutoring system for engineering students enrolled in statics courses. Our system not only allows students to enter planar truss and free body diagrams into the system just as they would with pencil and paper, but our system checks the students work against a hand-drawn answer entered by the instructor, and then returns immediate and detailed feedback to the student. Students are allowed to correct any errors in their work and resubmit until the entire content is correct and thus all of the objectives are learned. Since Mechanix facilitates the grading and feedback processes, instructors are now able to assign free response questions, increasing teachers knowledge of student comprehension. Furthermore, the iterative correction process allows students to learn during a test, rather than simply displaying memorized information.

Mechanix: A Sketch-Based Tutoring System that Automatically Corrects Hand-Sketched Statics Homework

With the rise in classroom populations—in both physical classrooms and online learning environments such as massively open online courses—instructors are struggling to provide relevant and personalized feedback on student work. As a result, many instructors choose to structure their homework assignments and assessments via multiple-choice questions or other more automatable techniques, rather than assign complete problems and diagrams. In this work, we aim to provide a new solution to the instructors of introductory engineering courses. We leveraged the power of sketch-recognition and artificial intelligence to create Mechanix, a sketch-based system that tutors students through drawing and solving free-body diagrams. Mechanix can support problems that have only a single answer, as well as questions for which many answers might apply (i.e. design this vs. solve this).

The Impact of Pen and Touch Technology on Education

This book presents perspectives for and by teachers, school and university administrators and educational researchers regarding the great impact pen and tablet technology can have on classrooms and education. presents three distinctly valuable threads of research:Emerging technologies and cutting-edge software invented by researchers and evaluated through real classroom deployments. First-hand perspectives of instructors and administrators who actively implement pen or tablet technologies in their classrooms. Up-and-coming systems that provide insight into the future of pen, touch, and sketch recognition technologies in the classrooms and the curriculums of tomorrow. The Impact of Pen and Touch Technology on Education is an essential read for educators who wish get to grips with ink-based computing and bring their teaching methods into the twenty-first century, as well as for researchers in the areas of education, human-computer interaction and intelligent systems for pedagogical advancement.

EasySketch: A Sketch-based Educational Interface to Support Children’s Self-regulation and School Readiness

Fine motor skills and executive attentions play a critical role in determining children’s self-regulation. Self-regulation contributes to children’s school readiness. Fine motor skills and executive attentions can be taught through sketching and writing activities. The growing ubiquity of touch-enabled computing devices can enhance children’s sketching ability via sketch-based playful educational applications. From the applications, children can draw sketches and potentially develop their fine motor skills. Unfortunately, those applications do not analyze the maturity of children’s fine motor skills in order to help parents and teachers understand the strengths and weaknesses of a child’s drawing ability. If an intelligent user interface can determine children’s fine motor skills automatically, teachers and parents can assess children’s fine motor skill ability and help children to improve via practicing drawings with touch-enabled devices or pencil and paper. The improvements can also extend to the children’s self-regulation ability and thus their school readiness. In this paper, we present our sketch-based educational application EasySketch. The application teaches children how to draw digits and characters, classifies the sketcher’s level of fine motor skill automatically, and returns feedback corresponding to that result.

The Digital Sash: A Sketch-Based Badge System in a Social Network for Children

In this chapter, we present a sketch-based reward system for promoting the practice of digital citizenship skills within our custom social network for children aged 7 to 12 years. This badge system prompts budding social networkers to complete fun, creative sketching activities and short writing tasks. Because we have deployed our custom social network (KidGab) within our local Girl Scouts Council, our badge system takes the form of a digital Girl Scout sash. In this work, we discuss the badges that prompted the most participation from our users and provide example responses for each. Finally, we consider methods in which our system and results might be generalized to suit non-scouting populations of children such as classrooms, clubs, and sports teams.

It’s Not Just about Accuracy: Metrics That Matter When Modeling Expert Sketching Ability

Design sketching is an important skill for designers, engineers, and creative professionals, as it allows them to express their ideas and concepts in a visual medium. Being a critical and versatile skill for many different disciplines, courses on design sketching are often taught in universities. Courses today predominately rely on pen and paper; however, this traditional pedagogy is limited by the availability of human instructors, who can provide personalized feedback. Using a stylus-based intelligent tutoring system called SketchTivity, we aim to eventually mimic the feedback given by an instructor and assess student-drawn sketches to give students insight into areas for improvement. To provide effective feedback to users, it is important to identify what aspects of their sketches they should work on to improve their sketching ability. After consulting with several domain experts in sketching, we came up with several classes of features that could potentially differentiate expert and novice sketches. Because improvement on one metric, such as speed, may result in a decrease in another metric, such as accuracy, the creation of a single score may not mean much to the user. We attempted to create a single internal score that represents overall drawing skill so that the system can track improvement over time and found that this score correlates highly with expert rankings. We gathered over 2,000 sketches from 20 novices and four experts for analysis. We identified key metrics for quality assessment that were shown to significantly correlate with the quality of expert sketches and provide insight into providing intelligent user feedback in the future.

WIPTTE 2015 High School Contest

The WIPTTE High School Contest was held on the first day of the WIPTTE conference on the Microsoft Campus in Redmond, Washington. The High School Contest is an annual event originating in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Texas A&M University, which extended into the WIPTTE conference. 2015 marked the second year of the WIPTTE High School Contest. During the contest, high school students participate in an intense day of brainstorming, design, prototyping, and presentation to compete against top schools across the United States. Nineteen high school and middle school students combined into four teams from two different schools: Renton Prep from Renton, WA, and University Prep from Seattle, WA. The high school students participated in many elements of WIPTTE throughout the Contest, including watching and commenting on the opening keynotes and presenting for the entire WIPTTE audience. Additionally, many students were able to participate in all three days of the conference. The students were active and engaged in the WIPTTE community, particularly while providing valuable feedback during the You-Try-It sessions.

Revolutionizing Education with Digital Ink

Derived from contributions to the Workshop on Pen and Touch Technology on Education (WIPTTE) in 2015, this edited volume highlights recent developments for pen and tablet research within the education system with a particular focus on hardware and software developments, comprising the perspectives of teachers, school and university administrators, and researchers for educators at every level. Split into six distinct parts, the book explores topics like how classrooms are increasingly using sketch-based videos, created by teachers and students alike, and how the teaching of key skills such as literacy, languages, math, and art via pen and touch technologieswithin the classroomare leading to improvements in engagement, learning, and retention levels amongst students. Future perspectives of digital learning, as envisioned by current high school students, are also explored