About the sci2u-technology

Mission

sci2u is introduced to provide an active learning environment for students. With sci2u the textbook material is enhanced with abundant amounts of interactive elements, including multiple-choice quizzes and a peer-instruction comment-reply tool.

sci2u quizzes

A student studying on his/her own will get immediate feedback from the multiple-choice quizzes and can repeat them over and over again until he or she masters the topic. Students working together in study groups will experience slightly different versions of the quiz questions with e.g. numbers occuring varying slightly. This provides a setting, where the students can discuss the solution models while still being nudged to make individual efforts to find the correct answers to their own problems.

Content

Teaching material is available for university entry-level calculus, physics, and computer programming, but educators are invited to contact the authors if they feel committed to develop more teaching material. The material may be written in standard LaTeX format in an external editor and uploaded on the homepage when ready.

History

The homepage was first established in the Spring of 2014 and tested with 30 students in a Quantum Mechanics course taught by the author. The homepage hosted a collection of multiple-choice quizzes that had to be solved within a strict time limit.

A second version of the homepage was introduced in the Fall of 2014 and served to train 150 1st year students in a general physics course as well as in an introductory course in using MATLAB to solve physics problems. With this version, multiple-choice quizzes still had to be solved within a time limit, but an option was introduced so students could ask for extra time facing a slight reduction in the maximum award possible.

The third generation of the homepage appeared in the Summer of 2015 and was used for two years, helping more than 2000 students at Aarhus University and University of Southern Denmark to master aspects of elementary calculus, elementary physics and MATLAB. With this version, the time limit concept was abandonned. In Winter 2017 a test version appeared in which a complete textbook was hosted on the homepage, reducing the multiple-choice quizzes to exercise sections.

The present fourth generation framework for sci2u was conceived and developed jointly with Niels Lauritzen into an interactive learning system with textbooks containing a wide variety of material including text, figures, videos, multiple-choice quizzes and much more. The quizzes now come in two ways - either as lists of quizzes where students can freely decide which quizzes to solve, or as quizzes that are part of games. In the latter form, the student may only advance to new quizzes if the previous ones were solved sufficiently well.

The Team

Bjørk Hammer (2014-2019)

Niels Lauritzen (2016-2019)

Emil Bahnsen (2018-2019)

Pernille Hammer (2018-2019)

Christoffer Nielsen (2016-2018)

Cecilie Kjer (2018)

Lasse Nielsen (2018)

Martin Knudsen (2018)

Melinda Varró (2016-2017)

Jakob Kristensen (2015-2016)