This line is build around « ACTIF » PIA/e-fran project. It aims for conceiving educational tools and methods making “active” and “collaborative” learning in secondary school easier using pen-based digital tablets. In this project we will focus on designing a freehand geometric figures editor able to understand pupils drawing in order to give them immediate and customised corrective or supporting feedbacks.
In geometry, drawing figures may sometimes be really difficult for students who have to integrate and memorise long instructions before producing the figure, then make some back-and-forth between the two information sources. Some studies showed that providing hints to guide students towards relevant parts of the figure may limit those difficulties. The scientific challenge to take up is of a technological nature because to help the student with his mistakes at a specific point of the instructions, a human intervention is currently required. Here the goal is to design a system able to understand and analyse in real time the geometric figures produced by a student to assist him by rewriting his hand-written drawings and giving him personalised feedbacks. These feedbacks will be both corrective (feedbacks when a step is not correctly achieved) and predictive (guidance in the figure or text for the next step to carry out).
This is a twofold scientif issue : first create a real-time handwritten figures and schemes recognition and interpretation engine and then compare the geometrical drawings of the children to the solving strategies of the problem submitted by the teacher.