ProjectProposal-JoeHart
From CS160 User Interfaces Fa06
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Problem Description
In my discussion with a few school teachers they say that they spend an inordinate amount of time reading and grading student's work. One problem with student evaluation is the maintaining of grades in an online format. A teacher must first grade a student's work and then copy this grade in to an online gradebook. At first this doesn't seem like a big problem but when a teacher has 30-35 students per class and six classes a day, this process can be very slow and error prone.
Target User Group
The target user groups for this project are middle school and high school teachers. When talking with a few members of this group they complained about the amount of time spent recording grades in gradebooks. This target group varies in their computer literacy but most do the majority of their grading with pen and paper. This project stems from a trend requiring teachers to maintain online accessible gradebooks for parents and school administration. Teachers would like a solution that "bridges" the gap from the pen and paper world to the digital grading world.
Problem Context and Forces
The student work cycle is as follows:
- 1) Teacher: assigns homework and a due date.
- 2) Student: completes the work and turns in the work to the teacher.
- 3) Teacher: evaluates the work, marks corrections, suggestions, and notes to student.
- 4) Teacher: writes a grade onto the work.
- 5) Teacher: re-records this grade into a gradebook.
- 6) Teacher: Returns work to student.
The aim of this project is to streamline this process by removing redundancies while still keeping an effective feedback loop from teacher to student. For instance, using the Anoto pen and paper system, the grade written on a students work can be automatically entered into the teacher gradebook for the appropriate student. This will save the teacher's time and help to prevent mistakes by reducing a redundant step and by limiting copy errors.
Teachers will not have to modify their current process much to gain efficiencies by using such a system. They will be able to grade homework in any location (home, conference, public transportation, etc.) using the Anoto pen and synchronize the grades to their computer when back at school. Since the users are already used to a pen and paper interface when grading papers, this system should be easy for them to learn. It is an inexpensive option to other more complex grading systems. Finally, it is robust since a failure in the electronics of the pen still allows the teacher to write grades and manually reenter grades if necessary.
Solution Sketch
