Digital Learning Educational Innovation Across Northwestern

Sketching is a valuable way to think and communicate in many STEM disciplines. Sketch Worksheets are a new kind of sketch-based educational software, developed at Northwestern, designed to facilitate spatial learning. Each worksheet represents a specific exercise which a student does on a computer. Students get feedback based on an automatic comparison of their sketch with a hidden solution sketch. A software gradebook, which uses scoring rubrics in the solution sketch, helps instructors in grading. Sketch Worksheets have already been deployed in geoscience classes at Northwestern and at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and in AI classes here at Northwestern. They are domain-independent, requiring only that the exercise involves visual distinctions that the software can understand. Importantly, Sketch Worksheets are authored by instructors and domain experts, without needing AI researchers in the loop. This makes them scalable and customizable. (For example, search for “CogSketch” at http://serc.Carleton.edu/index.html you will find geoscientist-authored worksheets.)

This session will discuss the basic ideas behind sketch worksheets and we will walk through the construction of a simple worksheet, so you can see how they might be useful in your own classes. Some tablet computers will be provided for those who want to follow along, and you can of course download and install CogSketch on your own Windows