Newton's Pen

Abstract

We present Newton's Pen, a statics tutor implemented on a "pentop computer," a writing instrument with an integrated digitizer and embedded processor. The tutor, intended for undergraduate education, scaffolds students in the construction of free body diagrams and equilibrium equations. This project entailed the development of sketch understanding techniques and user interface principles for creating pedagogically-sound instructional tools for pentop computers. Development on the pentop platform presented novel challenges because of limited computational resources and a visually static, ink-on-paper display (the only dynamic output device is an audio speaker).We show that a system architecture based on a finite state machine reduces the computational complexity, and serves as a convenient means for providing context-sensitive tutorial help. Our pilot study suggests that Newton's Pen has potential as an effective teaching tool.

Using Analogy to Cluster Hand‐Drawn Sketches for Sketch‐Based Educational Software

“…Many sketch understanding systems exist but most stick to a single domain because they use sketch recognition (Lee et al 2007;de Silva et al 2007;Valentine et al 2012). No other sketch understanding systems use structure mapping as a model for comparison.…”

Write2Code: Pen-Based Educational Tool for Java

“…Research from the CSEd community on text-based coding as a strategy [4,8] and findings on intelligent tutoring systems based on handwritten input for education [9,10,11,12] motivate us to explore the following research questions:…”

“…Work similar to Le & Nakagawa's research [11], which introduces a system that recognizes online handwritten mathematical expressions (MEs) to assist on K-12. De Silva et al [12] also found tutoring systems useful in contexts such as circuits calculi on Kirchhoff laws.…”