DEVELOPMENT OF AN AUTOMATIC PLOTTER FOR GENERATING EXERCISES FOR STATICS COURSE IN ENGINEERING

In the virtual platform for Statics course of Engineering School at EAFIT University it was implemented an automatic plotter for generating exercises to study truss type structures and beams in civil, mechanical and production engineering. Through graphics changes, range of variables and requested questions, the student is provided with different exercises each time that they log in to the platform, achieving the personalization in the learning and evaluation process. The plotters for the structures are developed in JAVA language, and the questions generated are converted into a compatible format with the management learning system MOODLE. Since 2012, the engineering students’ population who have enrolled the Statics course is 1909, and all of them have solved exercises generated with automatic plotters. From the design of an automatic generator an unlimited questions bank is obtained to implement in the virtual platform, it allows to get security when applying evaluation tests due to the fact that each person solves a different question. The present study shows the design and programming methodology used to make plotters so it can be extended to others virtual environments in basic sciences. Future works consists in making automatic generators that allow to define difficulty levels to guide the students in a progressive study in the course topics.