I-Corps: Evaluating the Market Potential of the Mechanix Sketch Recognition Software

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Introductory engineering courses within large universities often have annual enrollments exceeding several hundreds of students, while MOOCS and online classes have even larger classes. It is very challenging to achieve differentiated instruction in classrooms with class sizes and student diversity of such great magnitude. In such classes, professors can only assess whether students have mastered a concept by using multiple-choice questions. However, in a multiple choice scenario, students only have to identify the answer rather than create the answer, and the feedback received is only of a binary nature (right or wrong). Additionally, a growing concern among engineering educators is that students are losing both the critical skill of sketched diagrams and the ability to take a real system and reduce it to an accurate but simplified free-body diagram (FBD). The proposed software program, Mechanix, provides an artificially intelligent, scalable online instructional platform for engineering and physics instruction.Mechanix is a sketch-based tutoring system for engineering students enrolled in statics courses. Mechanix not only allows students to hand-draw solutions with planar truss and free body diagrams, just as they would with pencil and paper, but it also checks the student's work. It uses sketch recognition to determine both the component shapes and features of the sketched diagram and the relationships between those shapes and features. Mechanix then uses those relationships to determine whether a student's work is correct and why it is incorrect, enabling Mechanix to return immediate personalized feedback to the student otherwise not possible in large classes. The iterative correction process facilitates student learning. Additionally Mechanix relieves the instructor of the resource intensive burden of grading even very complex, hand-sketched work. This enables the instructor to explore creative problem solving material that may be otherwise too resource intensive to evaluate. The Mechanix software has been successfully deployed in the classroom at three schools with over 300 participating students, showing promising learning and student engagement results. In this project the I-Corps team seeks to determine customer needs in those markets where Mechanix may have the greatest impact in its current form: learning institutions, instructors, students and providers of educational content. The team also seeks to determine the alignment of Mechanix with those needs and changes that may be required; and to determine whether there exist additional markets where this technology may be applied.