Physics
| Rating: | Not rated yet |
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| Type: | Course Related Materials |
| Grade Level: | Post-secondary |
Abstract: The current online Andes Physics course is intended to be used with most physics textbooks. It supplements the textbook by providing problems for students to solve with the aid of Andes, an intelligent tutoring system developed at the University of Pittsburgh and the United States Naval Academy with funding from the Cognitive Science program of the Office of Naval Research. Students solve typical textbook problems just as they would with pencil and paper, by entering vectors, coordinate systems, equations, variable definitions, etc. Students are free to make as many entries as they want in order to solve a problem. After they make each entry, they receive immediate feedback on its correctness. They can also ask why an entry (e.g., an equation) is wrong, and they can request hints on what to do next in order to solve the problem. Their score on a problem can be based mostly on the entries made while deriving the answer, and not just on the answer itself. The Andes Physics course currently provides over 350 problems that are suitable for both calculus and non-calculus introductory physics courses at the college or advanced high school level. For instance, in recent sections of the introductory physics course at the US Naval Academy, 80% of the assigned homework problems during the fall Mechanics course were done on Andes, and 50% of the assigned homework problems during the spring Electricity and Magnetism course were done on Andes. More problems are being added to Andes with each release.
