Generation of Personalized Tasks and Corresponding Sample Solutions in MATLAB

Learning the fundamentals of electrical engineering is not a spectator sport: lecturers can explain the basics to students, but they cannot make them understand. Students need to actively work through many examples, from simple to more sophisticated. Simple topics can be implemented with multiple choice questions or numerical problems, while handwritten solutions are more appropriate for more complex problems where circuits, formula conversions, or diagrams can be quickly sketched. Students also need frequent and timely feedback on their progress and results. To increase engagement in electrical engineering and improve student understanding, MATLAB^® and LaTeX are used to create personalized assignments so that students can collaborate and discuss different approaches to a handwritten solution, but they cannot simply copy and plagiarize from each other. Students then correct and evaluate their peers' submissions in a double-blind, anonymous feedback process to reduce the review burden on instructors and supervisors. Personalized sample solutions help students to perform the review in a technically correct way, even if they were not able to solve their own problem correctly. This presentation shows how MATLAB can be used as a framework to automate the process of generating individualized problems and sample solutions, sending them to students, and organizing the administrative process of peer review and grading. The talk will conclude with some experiences from the past semesters and a look into the future with some suggestions for further improvements.