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Welcome to a demonstration video of Smart Study, a Master thesis project designed for
primary school children. Smart Study is an educative platform that digitalizes handwritten
answers written with a pen on paper, which afterwards corrects those answers, and visually
displays this for the student. It uses a Livescribe Smartpen for the writing part, and an Android
tablet for the student's solutions, corrections, feedback and overall results of the completed
exercises.
These are the exercise pages. Currently, there are 4 of them. The first 2 pages are arithmetics,
the first one being addition and substraction, and the other one being multiplication. The
other 2 pages are geometry, the first one being about triangles and the other one being
about rectangles. The level of these exercises is aimed at students of the 5th grade.
This the smartpen we will be using to write down the answers. It writes like a normal
pen, but everything that is written down on the paper is captured. This way, the handwritten
answers are digitalized, so they can be corrected and visually displayed. There is also a small
display on the pen on which textual feedback can be given.
This is the Android tablet with the Smart Study app on it. It has the ability to correct
the answers of a completed exercise page, and can visually display the student's solutions,
corrections, feedback and overall results of the completed exercise pages.
For the communication between the smartpen and the tablet, an intermediary program and
a database are necessary for processing the communication signals between both ends and
storing or retrieving the data. The program is running in the background, and should be
of no concern to the user. The operations are executed automatically, which eliminates
any possibility of user interaction. It also offers feedback of its current state, which
can come in handy if you want to watch the communication process up close.
Let's start. We'll fill in an exercise page of geometry, rectangles. We power on the smartpen.
Before we start filling in the exercises, we can check whether the smartpen understands
which page we are currently filling in. Simply tap the title of the page, and it will textually
display the current page. This is not necessary, you can just start filling in right away.
For the first question, we need to fill in the coordinates. When you write down an answer,
the display on the screen also notifies the user of its answer. If you write outside of
an answer zone, nothing will be saved. We continue filling in all the coordinates. For
this pair, we'll answer them incorrectly. The last pair we'll answer correct again.
Now let's fill in the second question. We can first work out the exercise a bit before
giving our final solution. We do the same for the third and final question, but we'll
fill in this one incorrectly. When done filling in the page, we tap on 'I am ready'. The solutions
are now saved onto the pen, and can be extracted by the program so the data can be further
processed.
Now that the exercise page is filled in, we go over to the Smart Study app on the tablet.
The student chooses its name from the list. This list can be bound to a specific school,
class or even one single student, by providing an additional configuration file per tablet
device. Once a name has been selected, you are provided with the home screen. On top,
information about the current student is displayed. You can chose between 2 options here, either
correct the exercise page you just filled in, or give an overview of the results of
all the exercise pages. This option will be demonstrated later on in this video. Let's
correct the exercise page first. Tap on sign that says 'Make exercises'. In this screen
we can tap on the sign that says 'Check my solutions' or go back. Let's check our solutions.
The tablet now waits on confirmation that the data has successfully been extracted from
the smartpen, and has been inserted into the database.
For this to happen, the program needs to extract the data from the smartpen. This version of
the smartpen required a wired connection through USB. Newer versions of the Livescribe smartpens
can be connected in a wireless way. Once connected, the program will acquire the signal send from
the tablet that it can extract the data from the pen. It detects the pen, extracts the
data, inserts the data into the database, and updates its state. The program also gives
feedback about its current state, and logs this.
Going back to our app, we can see it has acknowledged the updated state of the program, and is ready
to retrieve the data from the database. This is how the solution screen looks like. The
questions are displayed, along with the student's answers, and possible corrections. The questions
here can be tapped, and on the right side of the screen feedback about the solution
will be given. Initially, the first question is always selected. We can see here that most
of our answers were correct. The ones we filled in wrong are coloured in red. We now tap on
the second question to get some feedback. Here, we needed to calculate the outline of
the rectangle. Animated feedback is given on how to calculate this step by step. Text
is displayed below the figure, while coloured in parts of the rectangle are accentuated
to clearly display which part of the figure is being explained. We now do the same for
the third question, in which we needed to calculate the surface of the rectangle. We
filled in the wrong answer for this question, and so next to it the actual solution is displayed.
The feedback gives us again step by step how to calculate the surface of the rectangle
in an animated way. When we are done, we select 'Save'. We now return to the home screen.
Let's do the same now for an exercise page of arithmetics.
We fill in our page again. We can use this space to work out the exercise, and give our
final answer here.
The exercise page has been filled in, with 2 answers that are wrong, and 2 exercises
that haven't been filled in. We again tap on 'I am ready' to save our answers.
The app on the tablet is still running, and the same user is logged in. We again tap on
'Make exercises' and then on 'Check my solutions'.
The program acknowledges the request from the tablet, extracts the solutions from the
smartpen, inserts them into the database, and changes its state.
The app acknowledges the updated state of the program, and retrieves the data from the
database. We can again see the questions, student's solutions, and possible corrections.
To the right, we again have our feedback panel, but this time it explains the answer by splitting
it up in parts until we get our final solution. We can see that 2 answers were filled in incorrectly,
and 2 questions were not filled in. We tap 'Save solutions' to return to the home screen.
We can now get an overview of all the exercise pages we have filled in. To do this, we tap
on 'My results'. The exercise pages that were filled in, and its score, are displayed here.
On the geometry exercise page, we only answered 1 of the 3 questions correctly, while on the
arithmetics exercise page we had 4 out of 8 questions answered correctly. The other
2 exercise pages we did not fill in, so it displays some text instead of the results.
This was a brief demonstration of what the Smart Study platform is currently capable
of. For more information, you can make contact through the Smart Study Youtube channel.