Evolving spelling exercises to suit individual student needs

The principle of evolving educational content – stepwise and stochastic refinement of problems on basis of a student’s previous success (first explored by Sklar and Pollack, 2000) – is extended and evaluated for the domain of spelling. Experimental results generated by an implementation shows that the evolutionary principle is not only sensitive to an individual student’s ability but allows the student to take novel paths through an open-ended problem space. Moreover, learning outcomes are confirmed both quantitatively and qualitatively and indicates that the technique transfers to a pedagogically challenging domain. We present how a problem space can be generated to effectively and automatically encompass a wider range of educational domains with little designer intervention.