Page - 228 - in Intelligent Environments 2019 - Workshop Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Intelligent Environments

and helpful to promote the student learning. If no feedback were given, the students might not be able to identify how or where they had gone wrong in the solution, severely limiting the benefit they gain from using the system. In this paper, we firstly describe our findings on the preferred approaches of current undergraduate Engineering and Mathematics students to studying mathematical topics outside of class time, including what resources they like to use, which highlights the need for good quality on-line resources. We then describe our attempt to remedy the situation via our CalculEng system, which provides a framework for structured questions, allowing algebraic format input of answers by students. Through the use of a Computer Algebra System, our tool allows the student's attempt at solution against both the correct answer, and against expected "common mistake" answers. Appropriate feedback can then be given according to whether the student's answer was correct, included one or more anticipated "common errors", or did not follow an expected pattern. A limitation of the initial version of CalculEng was the requirement for questions, correct answers and anticipated errors, with corresponding feedback responses, all to be hand-coded in XML. However, more recently, we have developed an editing tool (as a Java application) which enables the creation and editing of structured questions in a straightforward and user-friendly way, such that the required XML is generated by the application. This editing tool greatly simplifies the task of creating and editing questions, and should make it easier for teachers to create and share their own resources via CalculEng, hence increasing the range of topics covered and number of practice problems available to students. Pilot studies using our system for a small number of Calculus topics on a relative small group of students have already been carried out, and we hope to extend both the range of topic material covered and the variety of students to whom these are offered in the near future. The remainder of this paper is structured as follows. In the next section, we review some of the related previous work on the use of computer-based educational technology to enhance students’ learning of mathematics in Higher Education. In section 3, we describe our study to investigate students’ views on how they prefer to learn mathematics, and what type(s) of resources they like using to help them do so. This study showed that modern students have a preference for web-based resources, but (as noted above), there is a lack of the right type of on-line, freely-available practice exercises which can be automatically marked whilst also giving the student user constructive, meaningful feedback on their attempted solutions. In section 4, we describe our attempt to address this via our CalculEng tutorial tool. We first outline the development of the early version of CalculEng, noting its strengths and weaknesses, before detailing how we have attempted to remove those weaknesses through a new editing tool for structured questions and noting the current status of our system. Finally, we present our conclusions and suggest future directions for this work. 2. Previous Related Work on Educational Technology for Mathematics There have been many attempts to address the difficulties which many students face when trying to learning mathematical topics. Since the 1960s and 70s, academics teaching Mathematics to Engineering students investigated the potential of using M.Davis etal. /Developing“Smart”TutorialTools toAssist StudentsLearnCalculus228