Procedural generation of problems for elementary math education
Yi Xu (Student TU Delft)
Roger Smeets (Futurewhiz)
Rafael Bidarra (TU Delft - Computer Graphics and Visualisation)
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Abstract
Mathematics education plays an essential role in children’s development, and there are many online applications aimed at supporting this process. However, manually creating math problems with a variety of textual and visual content is very time-consuming and expensive. This article presents a generic approach for procedural generation of mathematical problems, including their corresponding textual representations. The content generation process consists of two phases: Abstract math problem generation and text generation. For the generation of abstract math problems, we propose a generic template-based method that operates across a variety of difficulty-levels and domains, including arithmetic, comparison, ordering, mathematical relationships, measurement, and geometry. Subsequently, we propose a multi-language adaptive textual content generation pipeline to realize the generated abstract math problems into semantically coherent text questions in natural language. A workflow time gain evaluation shows that the system yields an average time saving of 56%. Further, human expert evaluation of this approach indicates that the content it generates is sensible and solvable for primary school students.
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