Dynamic Support for Virtual Math Teams

Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh PA

Investigators

Abstract

Free on-line learning promises to transform the educational landscape of the United States through a significant broadening of supplemental educational opportunities for low income and minority students who do not have access to high quality private tutoring to supplement their in school education. The proposed solution is to develop a technological augmentation to available human support in a lightly staffed Virtual Math Teams (VMT) environment as well as deploying conversational agents that are triggered by automatically detected conversational events and that have the ability to elicit valuable collaborative behavior such as reflection, help seeking, and help provision. This project brings together expertise in technological development and careful experimentation both in the lab and in the classroom, a track record for large scale deployment of educational materials, and a solid foundation in significant student learning results in collaborative environments. The project builds on results from a pilot project in which the team has built VMT-Basilica, which is a technical infrastructure for supporting collaborative problem solving, as well as having conducted pilot studies with it in an on-line setting with promising results. The VMTs use the infrastructure provided by the Math Forum. This project also contributes to the general development of intelligent agents to aid collaboration in a wide variety of settings where collaboration support is needed. By bringing together research in education environments and in computer based intelligent agents, this project is potentially transformative in both computer science and mathematics education. The project has the potential to bring mathematics to a national community since the development of these agents will substantially reduce the amount of time a human must monitor VMT collaborations. VMTs operate primarily out of the classroom and act as supplemental work for students learning mathematics. In addition, since the collaboration support provided by these agents is not specific to mathematics problem solving, agent supported collaboration could be expanded to any field where collaboration needs to be supported - from education to business to the military.