RESEARCHES IN HIGHER EDUCATION OF ENGINEERING 1999.

Design Idea of the Electronic Exercise Book

Chen Naili1, Chen Chongwei2
(1. Dept. of Mechanics, Zhejiang Univ., Hangzhou, 310027, China;
2. Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering, Zhejiang Univ., Hangzhou, 310027, China)
Abstract: In this paper, a courseware named Electronic Exercise Book (EEB) is proposed which
consists of four parts, i.e. expression checker, library manager, graphic processor and user
interface. The main part of EEB, expression checker, can recognize and check the steps inputted
by students when they are solving computational problems. Each step is processed as a general
expression and its correctness is determined by specified rules including the validity of the
expression in its numerical value, symbol value as well as dimension, the similarity between the
expression and the answers in a standard library, and the logic consistency of a sequence of steps.
To keep the subjectivity of the computational problems, in EEB, students can input their steps
freely without any limitation, and EEB will just response to the input when necessary. Moreover,
with its extensible library, EEB can be easily generalized to any fields though initially it is
designed for mechanics teaching.