Speaker
Description
A common challenge in education is that students attend classes to write down what is explained, remaining passive otherwise. Even if every part of the practiced exercises is understood, much more thinking, questioning and understanding arises when actively exercising. It is highly desirable to encourage this on a regular basis during the semester to achieve continuous learning and to prevent students being overwhelmed by quickly rising levels of difficulty.
So far, this encouragement was achieved by writing one qualifying exam during the semester in our engineering mechanics courses. That exam has to be passed after two attempts to achieve admission to take the final exam at the end of semester and is a good possibility for students to recapitulate and exercise what has been taught. Moreover, they get an impression of the necessary standard of knowledge as well as structure and grading of an exam. These advantages are contrasted by two main drawbacks: 1. The qualifying exam adds only one occasion to the course where students are required to exercise and therefore only provide little encouragement for continuous learning and 2. Grading the qualifying exams is a laborious process.
In this context, we present a concept for electronic assignments as a means of continuous exercising. It is planned to demand the completion of an assignment every two weeks which aims at recapitulating the recent topics of the course and which also has to be passed by the students to be allowed to take the final exam. The tasks are randomized to encourage individual working and discussing the approaches for solutions in study groups and they are developed using STACK (System for Teaching and Assessment using a Computer algebra Kernel) within the Moodle environment. We also use M. Kraska's Meclib library which significantly eases the development, provides high-quality mechanical plot elements and allows for interactive tasks, which are one focal point of the work.
In the presentation, we will show our approach to developing the assignments, which aim to be close to real-word applications and show example tasks.
