Satisfiability solvers have been shown to be a powerful tool for solving constraint problems. These problems often contain pseudo-boolean and cardinality constraints. These constraints can either be encoded into SAT or handled by extending the solver with special propagators. Which method will perform better is often not known in advance. It has been shown that adding the encoding during the search can be beneficial. This thesis extends those methods by incrementally constructing the encoding during the search. This work proposes several methods that only encode the active parts of the constraint. In contrast to previous work the full encoding of the constraint is not determined beforehand but instead is determined during the search. The results show that during the search the same subset of variables is active and therefore not all variables are needed for the encoding. Furthermore, this work shows that the order of the literals in the encoding has effect on the performance. However, this mostly affects the first part of the solve process, and therefore the effect on optimization problems is limited. Finally, it shows that an incremental encoding can lead to a smaller encoding while having similar results as adding the full encoding during the search.

During this project we have created a product for the company FeedbackFruits to promote critical thinking in education. Research has shown that argument mapping is a promising method to promote critical thinking. Several existing related platforms were analyzed to draw lessons from their experience. Literature research revealed that product interaction design is very important for teacher adoption and student engagement, which were are also identified as key factors for product success by the client company. We took steps to realize this requirement by researching student engagement and adopting company guidelines used to ensure quality design (e.g. use of company UI framework, internal design review, user testing). User tests indicated enthusiasm and high engagement by the participants, but also showed clear areas of improvement. Though comparable existing solutions are promising for teaching critical thinking, further development and testing would be needed to validate the didactic potential of this product. Considering the limited time available for the project, we have included this in the recommendations on future development and research.