Enhancing Creativity by Test Diversity

Elements of education fall in four major categories—teaching, learning, evaluation, and experimentation. Each of these elements can have differing impact on the overall result of an education process, partly due to the personal experience provided to learners. Obviously, this connection also holds when parts of the education process are implemented in e-learning tools. However, often electronic modules just mimic the traditional education module they are supposed to replace or support. The typical quiz generator, for example, selects a certain amount of questions from its input to generate a quiz. However, since the initial set of questions is static, the number of possible quizzes is static as well. Students will have to take several quizzes before having seen all questions and this is often experienced as being very unsatisfactory. We suggest using finite automata, a well-understood abstraction technique from computer science, as input data for test generation. This allows describing test data in a concise and compact way, and generating a potentially infinite number of tests as well as a checker to verify solutions.