Exploratory Learning Environments (ELEs) allow learners to approach a problem in different ways; they are particularly suitable for ill-defined problems where knowledge is less structured and open-ended exploration is allowed. Moreover, multiple solutions which are equally valid are possible and a common and efficient way to convey this is by promoting and supporting students’ collaboration. Su...

Investigations of attached partial cavitation are important because to prevent damages in hydrulic machinery and to reduce the costs. As expected computational fluid dynamics (CFD) methods have been developed for more than 40 years to understand this phenomenon and to improve the machinery designs, as pumps and hydraulic turbines. However, cavitation appears at high Reynolds numbers, so that, t...

In this paper, we present the application of unsupervised learning techniques to automatically recognize behaviors that may be detrimental to learning during interaction with an Exploratory Learning Environment (ELE). First, we describe how we use the k-means clustering algorithm for off-line identification of learner groups with distinguishing interaction patterns who also show similar learnin...

The goal of this paper is to investigate various language model smoothing techniques and decision tree based language model design algorithms. For this purpose, we build language models for printable characters (letters), based on the Brown corpus. We consider two classes of models for the text generation process: The n-gram language model and various decision tree based language models. In the...

10 AI MAGAZINE Modern educational software is open ended and flexible, allowing students to build scientific models and examine properties of the models by running them and analyzing the results (Amershi and Conati 2006; Cocea, Gutierrez-Santos, and Magoulas 2008). Such exploratory learning environments (ELEs) are distinguished from more traditional e-learning systems in that students can build...