Teaching mechanics with individual exercise assignments and automated correction

TL;DR

This paper presents a scalable method for creating, distributing, and automatically correcting individual exercise assignments in large mechanics courses, enhancing student engagement and understanding.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach to generate and assess personalized exercises, addressing scalability and promoting reflective learning in large classes.

Findings

Students found the tool valuable for learning

The approach increased student engagement and reflection

Automated correction reduced grading workload

Abstract

Solving exercise problems by yourself is a vital part of developing a mechanical understanding. Yet, most mechanics lectures have more than 200 participants, so the workload for manually creating and correcting assignments limits the number of exercises. The resulting example pool is usually much smaller than the number of participants, making verifying whether students can solve problems themselves considerably harder. At the same time, unreflected copying of tasks already solved does not foster the understanding of the subject and leads to a false self-assessment. We address these issues by providing a scalable approach for creating, distributing, and correcting exercise assignments for problems related to statics, strength of materials, dynamics, and hydrostatics. The overall concept allows us to provide individual exercise assignments for each student. A quantitative survey among students of our recent statics lecture assesses the acceptance of our teaching tool. The feedback indicates a clear added value for the lecture, which fosters self-directed and reflective learning.