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Personal Motivation

    All my life I have had a natural instinct for teaching. Over the years, I have embraced numerous teaching opportunities from helping friends after school in middle school with their math homework, all the way to TA’ing multiple classes at Cornell. In each of the situations, the experience of helping individuals to learn new ideas has been extremely rewarding.

    With that in mind, I have decided to focus my M-Eng project on the creation and use of educational software. What types of software currently exist, and how well do they work? How does interactive software like teaching programs differ from non-interactive software like lecture notes and diagrams?

    The main criteria for the educational software I will construct and study will be software to be used to aid a teacher/professor, not to replace one. Specifically, I will not cover distance learning software where the primary source of material is the software itself, but rather educational assistance software where the application is being used to supplement a lecture. For example, a student might hear a lecture in class about a topic and then go home and work with the piece of software for one night where the concepts from lecture are reinforced via the software.

Educational Background & Research

    Using the ACM Digital Library as a starting point, I researched numerous articles relevant to online educational software. These references can be found here. From these articles I learned three important pieces of information.


    • First of all, true instructional software is still not very well developed in most areas of study. For some subjects, the closest software is often just Test Prep pages that simply quiz the student with multiple choice answers. The major problem with this software is it really just tests a student’s knowledge in an area that they all ready know a lot about as opposed to teaching them anything new.

    • Secondly, although not conclusive, the experiments that I read about indicate that students perform better overall after using non-interactive software like lecture notes than they do with interactive software. This may be a failing of the specific interactive software used although more testing would need to be done with a larger variety of software to determine this.

    • Finally, while overall students seemed to do worse with the interactive software than with the non-interactive software, there was a clear indication that for the course's harder concepts, the interactive software taught the students better than the non-interactive software.

Project Focus

    Based on the research I collected, I have decided to focus my M-Eng project on writing interactive educational software that teaches one of the hardest concepts of a specific course. Since I have a background in TA’ing three database course, I have chosen to write my software around one of the hardest notions for many students to grasp in learning about databases for the first time: Database Normalization.

    I will implement a normalization tool that allows students, after they have learned about database normalization from a lecture, to sit down and input database schemas. The students will then be able to manipulate the database schemas and see the results of their changes immediately. This ability to interact with a database schema and see the results cleanly and quickly is especially important, since often times performing the calculations required to manipulate the schema can be extremely complicated. Often times students get so bogged down the calculations, or confused by mistakes in their calculations, that they can never really see database normalization strategies for what they really are.

Project Goals

    My goal is to help students to learn better. When the application is complete, I plan to introduce it to the database class I am currently TA’ing at Cornell. Since learning database normalization is a required part of their curriculum, I hope that by using my tool, they will learn the concepts better.

    Testing progress in educational environments is often feedback oriented since setting up control groups and experimental groups, students with access to the software and students without such access, often puts one group at a disadvantage. By interacting the students, though, I believe I can get a good idea of whether or not my program is helping them to learn the concepts any better. In addition, I always take feedback in the form of questions and e-mails if they have any comments about my software.

    If successful, my work will support the hypothesis that in many situations, when you tailor educational software to a specific subject matter, the results are always beneficial for the students.

Thanks

    I would like to thank Professor Gehrke for his guidance and support of this project. I would also like to thank my family and friends for their support and patience during my final year at Cornell.