Use of the STACK computer aided assessment system with first year undergraduate students.
In the academic year 2006-2007 we have been using the STACK computer aided assessment system with undergraduate mathematics students. This has taken place both at the University of Birmingham and the University of Warwick, UK.
The pilot at the University of Warwick was especially useful to us as the devlopment team in Birmingham as it involved a totally independent team who downloaded, installed and used the system for an academic year. Staff development took place to enable colleagues to learn the highly technical aspects of authoring their own learning materials in the STACK format.
We recieved detailed feedback from (i) their students and (ii) the colleagues authoring their own questions. Both have guided the further devlopment of the system from Jan 2007 onwards. The reports we received from them took the form of a detailed written report and site visits for interviews with key staff.
Colleagues were able to install and use STACK with their students. After staff development sessions they were able to author questions, with support being provided for technical questions on the obscure syntax of the Maxima computer algebra system.
Students very much liked the obvious (to them) mathematical sophistication of the STACK system and the course questionnaires were positive. Many students considered STACK to be a useful tool to help them learn mathematics and practice important mathematical techniques.
We recieved detailed feedback about the interactions students had with STACK. These can be grouped into two catagories.
(1) The overall design on the interactions and web-page navigation needed to use STACK. These observations have been very useful in guiding the current round of software development.
(2) Key to any mathematical software is the input of mathematical expressions by students. This is a very difficult issue to resolve since traditional mathematical notation has ambiguities. The feedback received has guided design of the DragMath software (see the related project). A detailed paper which has resulted from this work is referenced below.
A number of software bugs were identified and resolved. The most significant performance issue relates to the way computer algebra processes are managed - an operating system level technical problem - which we hope to have resolved in the forthcoming release of the next version of STACK in October 2007.
Further work is planned for 2007-2008 at the University of Birmingham, University of Warwick and the University of Manchester UK.
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