Syrus project: rich feedback on practice problems

Most educators know the value of practice problems and immediate feedback to student learning, and some have invested a great deal of time and effort in developing a large pool of practice problems in one form or another.  With the many demands on an instructor’s time and resources, it is difficult to build and maintain such a question bank.  Wouldn’t it be great if there was a piece of technology that could generate the practice problems and interact with the learner by providing individualized feedback in a way similar to the way we as instructors want to do this for each of our students?

Maybe there is.  With support from the National Science Foundation and Ohio State, Bruce Weide (CSE) and Harvey Friedman (Math and CSE) have found a way to use existing research software to automatically generate logic problems and their answers and to critique and guide student attempts to solve them.  Their creation is called Syrus.  It uses problem templates to generate practice problems and answers and provides the immediate feedback that students need to learn effectively.

Here’s a short video of Weide demo’ing an early prototype of Syrus, which was highlighted during 2008′s Five Minutes of Fame showcase of  eLearning projects at Ohio State.

If you want to know more, please join us in the Digital Union on Friday, May 14th, at 2:30 for a presentation and open discussion of Syrus by Bruce Weide and Harvey Friedman.

Have ideas for how you might use a system like Syrus in your teaching? Share them below.