GB2398135A - Educational system - Google Patents

Abstract

Apparatus and method for scheduling educational exercises for a student, the apparatus being arranged to: select for a particular student a group of exercise units dependent upon at least one parameter relating to the student and, from the selected group of exercise units, select a subset of exercise units which meet at least one predetermined criterion based on the student's past performance. The selection of the group and the subset may be carried out periodically, for instance each time the student indicates the intention to begin an exercise session. Thus the apparatus presents to the student exercises that reflect the student's performance and educational stage. A homework-setting module is also described.

Description

EDI]CATTONAL SYSTEM This invention relates to a system for providing an

educational tool for use by both student and educator.

It is widely acknowledged that many tasks undertaken by students and educators, such as teachers or lecturers, require the repetitive setting and marking of routine exercises. These tasks take up a significant proportion of an educator's time which could otherwise be used by teachers to address learning requirements of the students. Various approaches have been taken in an attempt to aid the student and the educator in the setting, doing and marking of exercises. One such product is described in US patent application no. 2002/0087560. This system provides a web-based system in which an educator can construct from a standard database exercises both for teaching and for testing. The student can then access these by way of the web and carry out the practice modules and the exercise modules in their own time. In one example, the exercises are generated as spreadsheets which include the correct answer and so a mark can be automatically generated within the spreadsheet for review by the educator.

Such a system has many advantages, the most obvious of which are as follows: an educator can set a number of modules which may be used many times over the years; the exercises can be distributed in a simple manner to a plurality of students; and the overall mark achieved by a student can be seen at a glance by the educator without the educator needing to mark each question individually.

However there is still a significant amount of work needed by the educator to set the exercises in the first place and to review each exercise to see the mark 2 1 achieved by the student. Also, from the student's point of view, the student is limited to the exercises set by the educator.

The invention will now be described further, by way of example only, with reference to the accompanying drawings, in which: Figure 1 is a schematic diagram of an implementation of a system according to the invention; Figures 2a, 2b and 2c show examples of a user interface which may be used with a system according to the invention; Figures 3a and 3b comprise a flow diagram illustrating an embodiment of the selection undertaken by a system in accordance with the invention; Figure 4 is a flow diagram illustrating an embodiment of the sort process undertaken by a system in accordance with the invention; Figure 5 is a flow diagram illustrating how the system may be used in a homework-setting mode; I Figure 6 is a flow diagram illustrating how the system may be used in a homework- setting mode.

An embodiment of a system incorporating the invention will now be described with reference to mathematics. However it will be clear to a person skilled in the art that the invention is applicable to other areas, in particular to any objective type of assessment such as sciences, language grammar tests, historical dates/names/places tests etc. The invention is also intended to be applicable in these areas.

Figure 1 is a schematic diagram of an implementation of a system according to the invention. The major components are shown; clearly other components may also be provided but these will not be discussed further here.

The system comprises a processor 10, a memory 12 and an input/output (I/O) device 14. The processor 10 may be as provided in any conventional Personal Computer (PC). The memory 12 may comprise any suitable memory e. g. RAM, ROM, EPROM etc. Preferably the program implementing the system is stored on a hard disk of the PC. The I/O device 14 may be a conventional keyboard/display but may also be a touchscreen display or any other suitable I/O means.

The system allows for the automatic scheduling and presentation of exercises to a student dependent upon various parameters relating to the student, including parameters which reflect a student's past performance. The system may carry out the selection of the exercise units periodically. This may be at defined times (e.g. once a week). However, in a preferred embodiment, the system re-calculates the schedule for the student each time the student indicates the intention to begin a session with the system (e.g. logs on to the system, clicks an icon indicating an exercise session etc). Thus the schedule of exercises presented to the student is contemporary at all times, with respect to the student's performance.

Session frequency and duration An example of a suitable user interface is shown in Figure 2a. The user interface shown in Figure 2a is the main interface presented to a student prior to presenting any exercises. The user interface includes a photograph 22 of the student and the student's name 23. A button 24 is provided for selecting "Revision" and a button 25 is provided for selecting "Homework". Other details for the student are shown below e.g. contact details, term dates, school name, class, and a summary of the student's performance to date.

As shown in Figure 2b, the user interface for the exercises represents a whiteboard 26 with a surrounding frame 27 and is the medium through which revision and homework questions are set and answered. It has a standard size and layout. Questions are always set through this medium, together with the answers and help texts.

The surrounding border 27 holds information regarding the exercises and progress. At the top is a photo 22 of the student, along with the name of the student, the exercise code and name, the date and time and duration of the exercise in minutes.

Along the bottom border is shown the current score and bonus points gained so far for the exercise. The total number of questions contained in the unit is also shown, together with a count of the number correctly answered so far. Along the base, two coloured bars 28 grow in size, one indicating the number of questions answered, the other indicating the time which has elapsed. These together give a simple visual indication to the student of his progress through the current exercise unit.

There are three buttons along the base. One 29 stops work (at which point a further screen will ask whether the student simply wants to pause, to finish permanently or postpone this exercise). Another 30 supplies the answer to the current question, and the third 31 supplies the hint or help text available.

Along the left side of the whiteboard, the border shows whether the current question has been answered correctly or not. A conventional tick and cross may be used or two animals may be used for this purpose - a right and wrong animal. These animals and others found on the whiteboard, together with various colours and settings, can be chosen by the student himself. No time is wasted in congratulation or admonishment. This is important when the student is answering questions which take only a few seconds each. The student continues largely independently of any signals, only noticing perhaps that he has made a mistake when he is unable to progress to the next question.

Further icons may be used to indicate whether a paper and pad is recommended, or whether a calculator should be used.

The student may also obtain stars 32 for the exercise unit. These stars build up in number ultimately leading to a prize being awarded either from the system or the student's own parents (for younger children). The points gathered are also accumulated on the student's homepage. When a set number of points has been obtained, the student may receive a pre- arranged treat or gift from parents.

In the revision mode, the treats may be project or term-based, as it is a useful motivational tool for the student to do what is after all effort over and above schoolwork.

As shown in Figure 2c, for any given student, the number of sessions per week for the subject 40 is entered via the I/O device 14. This should be a number the student can comfortably manage and is likely to be able to maintain. This is likely to be something in the order of 3-5 times per week. For each session, the time the student is prepared to devote to it 41 is specified. This time is then divided up into unit times in accordance with a table for each year. For juniors, minutes is considered to be a minimum session time.

Thus, a session time of 5-9 minutes would mean 1 exercise unit, 10-14 minutes allows for 2 units and so on. The average time in minutes per unit is taken, along with the estimated time per question from the exercise unit definition, as modified by the student's own time rating, to work out the number of questions to be set in the current unit, as will be explained further below.

The number of units per session, and the number of units per week is used to derive the expected number of exercise slots for the total period. This will be modified by the number of slots to be set aside for reinforcements (standard repetitions where approximately every week's, every month's and every term's new units are made up into composite units containing a mixture of questions).

The final figure then becomes the basic figure for the revision program as to how many unit slots there will be available.

The memory 12 stores a database of exercise units. This is an extensive collection of programs which generates the exercise units which make up the questions set by the system. Each exercise unit corresponds to one or more computer programs which dynamically generate a set of questions. Depending on the nature of the program, a single unit may be capable of presenting an almost infinite number of questions to a student. The programs are capable of producing a large number of similar questions for the unit in question. They do this by applying random generators to as many parameters as are relevant to the substance of the question.

Thus, angles in a triangle may be varied, as may be the shapes of planar or solid figures, the lengths of lines, the names of children or animals, toys, sweets or other items involved in the questions as well obviously as the values of the numbers involved, to produce a large number of variations on the theme of the question. Other techniques are used to produce variability as appropriate. For example, a basic set of say ten questions may be available, and then changes to the numeric values are applied to these to provide variety.

This would be particularly appropriate in for example geometry, or for story lines in practical arithmetic examples. Other techniques are used to provide variety for example in algebra.

An exercise unit is a set of related questions a student will sit down and do in a 5-10 minute session as part of his revision or homework. All the questions have a common theme, and are produced to practice a specific topic or skill.

For smaller children the exercise may be to practice the 2x table. Another separate exercise might be to practice a mixture of the 2,3 & 5x table. Finally, another exercise might be to practice a mixture of only the more difficult combinations in all the normal multiplication tables, 6x8, 9x7 etc. Each of these sets of questions would be provided by a separate exercise unit.

Exercise units may be combined together to provide a composite of several types of questions. Thus after revising say 4 different exercises during the week, on the last evening the student might be asked to tackle a smaller set from each of the four units to confirm proficiency before moving on to new material.

Finally, provision is made for the traditional approach, that is to say a set of pre-defined questions. This is more appropriate for specific exam revision, where one would want to try to include material closely mirroring actual past exam papers - e.g. entrance exams for London Public Schools, 11-plus, Common Entrance etc. It would also be useful in allowing teachers to send and have included first-rate material which would take too long to program up.

This is particularly relevant for the homework-generating part of the system where teachers are able to set homework for their classes based on the exercises available in the system. In this way teachers can include some of their own material particularly relevant to their class work.

Depending on the nature of the exercise unit, the number of questions available will vary. If a child is practicing a multiplication table in the most straightforward manner, a range of 0-12 per table will give 25 different alternative two-way questions. On the other hand, if a question involves children visiting a shop to buy a certain quantity of various different items each at a given price, the number of questions which may be generated becomes phenomenal (100 names, 5 stores, 3 items from 20, 3 from 5 different quantities, 3 from 20 different prices, these variables would be capable of generating several billion questions).

Each question is classified into a school year. One exercise may be used in more than one year - because the curriculum says so, or it is a concept of fundamental importance requiring understanding over a longer period of time, or indeed it is simply something which requires constant practice to keep knowledge and skill up to date.

The member of different exercise units for each year varies from year to year.

In general terms, the younger the year, the more alternative exercises are available to give many angles of illustration. Small children need graphical illustrations, with animals, objects etc as well as straightforward arithmetic. As a rule of thumb one could say that for younger children, in order to maintain the variety, at least as many exercises are needed as there are days in the school week, less time for multiple exercise revisions (ideally allowing in addition for one exercise per week where the whole week's work is repeated in one unit, and similarly one per month and one per term) plus repeats where necessary.

This would come to around 100-130 different exercises per lower year. It is the aim of the system to have about twice this number available.

However, the number of different exercises required does not depend on the number of topics or concepts taken up in each year (apart from obviously there being at least one exercise per topic). For the older students, it is not necessary to have as many different exercises per year. Questions tend to take longer to complete, so the number required will also reduce. On the other hand, it is more necessary at this level to divide questions into sub-questions to guide the student through the work required to come to the final answer. Where the system cannot give any credit for "showing your working", it is better to split each question into appropriate stages with an answer required for each. About 100 topic units per older year would be usual, each generating thousands of alternative questions.

Each exercise unit is rated in terms of its relative importance for a particular year, for instance, whether it is an essential exercise, a very useful alternative, or one of several which helps back up a central theme and provides variety.

This is obviously a very important consideration when deciding which exercises are to be included in the revision program, particularly when time is limited.

Each unit is also rated in terms of its difficulty. This is relevant in estimating its suitability for a given student, whether to include it when time is limited, or whether to repeat it due to poor performance etc. It should be noted that this rating is not connected to any hierarchy within the maths curriculum which may be imposed - once a tier has been set to a student, this is effectively his work for the year. It is within this year set that the difficulty rating is applied.

Furthermore, certain exercises may differ from one another simply in terms of arithmetic or conceptual difficulty. This may mean one unit is suitable for one year at one level, and at another level for a higher year. The difficulty rating may also be applied in conjunction with the internal rating of the student.

An exercise unit is also rated as to the time required to complete it. This is used by the system to allocate the appropriate number of questions to be set. It is also used in conjunction with the speed rating of the student. The speed rating of the student is based on past performance, whereas the speed rating of the question is initially estimated, refined by small trials, and then improved as it is used throughout the student base. The speed rating of the question is not of particularly vital importance. Too low a rating may mean that a student spends too long on a unit, even though he is not expected to continue after the allotted time is up, and that his score working towards the end- of-term treat may be slightly lower than it would otherwise be.

A much more important measure is whether the student puts in the unit times as agreed, and achieves a reasonable accuracy rate. As the term progresses, a student's score per unit may be increased slightly to make sure the final term's score more or less meets the treat score required.

The above parameters will be updated periodically, preferably each time the student accesses the system, so the system will always recalculate the student's schedule before each unit is set.

Although so far various revision modes of the system have been discussed, the system also works in an alternative homework mode, in which teachers at school can set up the homework for a given date for a particular class, group or individual student. Thus homework can be set for a given day, week, term or even for the whole year. The homework set can be modified at a later date.

The homework is based on the exercises units available. Teachers can add exercises to the system themselves. The set homework and the marked and graded results are sent between school and home via the internet.

As has been seen, the system is capable of differentiating between individual students and their particular needs, based on their own development in the subject. Teachers, relieved of the chore of marking homework would be able S to devote all their time and energy to their students' development in the subject.

Exercise units The programme for the whole system schedules the most appropriate exercise units for the individual based on the prospective time available, on the one hand, and the student's recorded history with previous exercise units, on the other.

The system uses a plurality of exercise units. Each exercise unit represents one or more exercises in a given area, for instance exercises suitable for Year 7 students in the area of fractions. Each exercise unit has a number of parameters associated with it.

Each exercise unit comprises a number of examples of what is fundamentally the same question or a related group of problems. The exercise units are intended to reflect the national curriculum.

The exercise units present questions to a student which appear on the display of the student's computer. The student then inputs the answer to the question, the system calculates whether the answer is right or wrong and presents an indication of this to the student via the display. The system also updates parameters associated with the exercise unit and the student dependent upon the student's performance. In particular the system updates the number of questions attempted, the number answered correctly, the number of retries, the time taken per question, number of answers, help and hint keys pressed, and the number of times the exercise unit has been done by the student.

If the answer is wrong, the student may request help from the system which in response then presents the student with assistance.

The idea behind the scheduler is give a score and status to all the different types of unit, and then to sort these in order to get the ideal order in which units should be set for a particular student. The system therefore allows a student to attempt exercises in a structured way, by providing related exercise units per session and providing instant feedback. Statistics are provided every time the student uses the system and a report may be made available to the student, the supervisor (e.g. a parent) or the teacher.

Unit Type Primary units These are considered to be the essential topics for the school year in question - where "topics" has a narrower meaning than usually applied to the subject. I There may be 100 of these primary topics for a year. They must all be covered I by the schedule. They will each cover a certain element of a major topic in the maths curriculum.

Alternative units These have the same importance as primary units. Thus, one part of a maths topic may be covered by several alternative exercise units, each of equal validity. However one is taken to be the primary unit. If there is time, the alternative units may be tackled to provide variety and different angles of illustration.

Extra Units These are additional units which although worth doing, do not rate as highly as the primary units. These can always be omitted if there is insufficient time available. If there is room for their inclusion, and some of these reach the same score, one is selected randomly.

Support Units These are units which can lead up to and help understanding of the primary exercise. They play an important part in the revision process. If a student scores a satisfactory score on a primary unit, there is no need for any further action except possibly further reinforcement at a later stage. But a low score on a primary unit may indicate a lack of understanding, and not only a lack of proficiency in carrying out the exercise. So instead of merely repeating the primary unit itself, possibly once again with less than satisfactory results, the supporting units for that exercise are also scheduled.

There may be several of these for each primary unit. These lead the student up to the primary exercise. One example of this would be to use simpler examples of the same exercise. Alternatively, the exercise may be broken down into its very smallest components and each of these practiced before the primary unit is repeated. One can easily imagine how this would work in say algebra or geometry. When fully rolled out, the system should have support exercises for every primary topic.

Although personal teaching or extra coaching may constitute the most effective way to teach maths, the program aims to provide the next best thing, and so a combination of hints, help texts and answers, plus the support unit concept aim to ensure that the student derives the maximum from the system even in circumstances where the initial problem may involve a lack of understanding.

The unit types mentioned above have a rating allocated to them, from the most important primary units down. It is this order of importance combined with the number of units available for scheduling which determines which units are I O selected.

Unit status A unit has a status, depending on whether the unit has yet to be tackled, has been repeated, or has been tackled with varying degrees of success. This score will modify the importance rating for the unit type.

Unit sequence number Each unit in the system is allocated a natural sequence number. Some units will be set before others because they naturally fall to be tackled in that order.

A support unit will be given a lower sequence allocation than its primary unit because if activated it should be set as a leading-up unit (but it will have a negligible importance rating unless the student does badly in the primary unit).

Postponed status These units have the highest sequence number which means that although they may be selected because of their importance, they will not come to the fore unless their "postponed" flag is removed (because the postpone date has passed).

Requested status This is where a teacher, tutor or parent has particularly asked for a certain unit to be set. They have the top importance rating and sequence, so they will always be selected and come first in the queue. They will therefore be tackled first.

The system can be used in a number of revision ways: standard revision, project-based and exam revision.

The standard revision program is intended to give students practice in the curriculum for the current academic year. Thus, this revision runs concurrently with normal school work. For reporting and incentive purposes, the year is split into three terms. Consequently, the student aims to achieve a certain score each term, although the setting and scheduling of exercises is done across the whole year. Provided all the other parameters are reasonable (an early enough start in the year, enough time agreed etc) scheduling for this should not be problematical, and the student should manage the program without having to drop any units. For this program type, one or more of the academic years in the year table is specified. The system makes assumptions as to the start and end of the school year or this may be input via the user interface (see Fig. 2c).

The second revision program type is project-based. This would be the case, say, if a student needed to revise last year's work before moving on to the curriculum for the current year. In these circumstances, the period will by definition be much shorter and the number of units must be reduced. There will be fewer opportunities for repeats and support units. Here, the period in question is recorded, along with the academic year or years.

The third revision program type is exam-revision. Here the student is studying directly for exams and a different approach comes into play. The student is set exam-type questions which aim to be as relevant as possible to the expected exam. For this, the exam is selected from the code table, together with the expected exam date (input via the user interface (see Fig. 2c)).

Figure 3 is a flow chart illustrating the operation of one aspect of the education system, the revision mode. This revision mode is responsible for setting teaching and testing exercises for a student. The program in the revision mode operates according to an algorithm as follows.

The main task of the program in the revision mode is to update the student's schedule of exercises to be performed. This is carried out immediately the student clicks the revision button on the student's homepage (see Figure 2a).

After completing the rescheduling, the first scheduled unit is taken and questions generated ready for the student to start revision.

There are three files in a student's installation, which are used, among other things, by the program to generate a new schedule: - The Student Profile, which is personal to the given student and contains details on the student and the agreed study period.

- The Exercise Units File, a database which contains information on all the exercise units, both those required to generate the actual questions, and those required by the program.

- The Student History File (SHE) which, for the given student, contains information on the units performed previously, units postponed, requested units specified by the student, parents or teachers, the unit currently in progress, and scheduled units not yet performed.

Each time the program is activated, the program will replace the scheduled units not yet performed by a new proposed schedule. The program will first check that the system is not in exam mode (in which case the system will move to that part of the system and generate a set of questions appropriate for the exam in question), or that it is time to perform one of the weekly, monthly or termly repeats (in which case the Student History File is consulted to find the set of units already performed during the past week, month or term to generate a set of revision units consisting of a mix of these units, and these will then be placed at the head of the scheduled but not yet performed units in the Student History File).

Otherwise, the program will rework the schedule to provide the best set and order for ongoing revision.

The steps taken by the program are described in further detail below with particular examples of parameters. Of course it will be clear to a personskilled in the art that these parameters can be modified by the system installer to alter or improve the performance of the program.

l) The program first checks the Student History File, and (301) sets the postponed date to zero for any units for which the postponed date is earlier than days.

2) The program then generates (302) an extract from the Exercise Units file comprising the following fields for each exercise unit: EU 1. Unique identifier EU 2. Postponed date EU 3. Requested date EU 4. Unit sequence number EU 5. Unit status (1=not done, 2=poor, 3=average, 4=good) EU 6. Number of times performed previously ED 7. Unit type (1=Primary, 2=Alternative, 3=Extra, 4=Support) EU 8. Primary unit unique identifier EU 9. Difficulty grade 1-10 EU 10. Date last performed EU 11. Unit's school year EU Fields 1, 4, 7, 8, 9 and 11 are extracted directly from the file, the other fields are set to zero, before being generated by the system as follows.

3) The Student History File is checked to see if any of the units in the extract file have been requested, and if so field 3 (Requested date) is set appropriately.

4) The Student History File is checked to see if any of the units has been postponed and if so, field 2 (Postponed date) is set accordingly.

5) The SHE is checked to find the last time if any each unit has been run.

The score obtained is used to generate the field 5 (Unit Status). This is set to 1 if the unit has not been performed before, set to 2 if the score was less than 13, to 3 if the score was 13-16, and 4 of the score was 1720. (Scores are scaled so that the maximum obtainable in each revision unit is 20).

6) The SHF is processed to count the number of times each unit in the extract has been performed previously. Only the last 18 months in the SHF are checked. Previous records are ignored. The figures are used to update the field 6 (Number of times performed previously).

7) The SHF file is checked to find the date each unit was performed previously during the last 18 months. This is used to update field 10 (Date last performed in the extract file).

8) The Student Profile is consulted to find the school year(s) under revision. This is matched against the extract file and only those records in the extract matching these years are retained (303).

9) Any units with the requested date set are removed from the extract and set aside (304).

10) Any units with the postponed date set are removed from the extract and set aside (304).

11) The total available number of units possible to run in the time remaining until the end of the period is calculated (305) from fields in the Student Profile.

The fields used are the number of sessions planned during term time and the time in minutes per session, the number of sessions planned during holidays and the time in minutes per session, and the period end date. The number of days from today's date to the end of the period is calculated. The term calendar is consulted to find which days are term and which are holidays. The daily session rates for these are then calculated from the weekly rates, and the number of revision units which can be fitted in per session length in minutes are calculated. The number of available revision units per day are then added together to give a total figure, for the rest of the period, of the number of units which can be scheduled. From this are subtracted the number of already requested units to give a final figure for the number of scheduled slots available.

12) The Student Profile is consulted to extract the student's ability rating.

This has been calculated by consulting the SHE to find all previous scores.

These are averaged over the periods 0-1 months, 1-6 months, 6-18 months.

The three averages are then weighted by 3, 2 and 1 respectively, to give an average score 0-20, from which 10 is subtracted to give a final student ability rating of 1-10.

13) The general minimum number of repeats is taken to be 3, and from this is subtracted 1 to give the exercise repeat number.

14) The extract file is processed (306) to find the primary units which have not yet been performed at all. These are placed at the top of a current scheduled units file (SUF).

15) The extract file is processed (306) to find the primary units performed within the exercise repeat number and for which the unit status is poor. These are added to the end of the current SUF after the not-done primary units.

16) The extract file is processed (306) to find the primary units performed within the exercise repeat number and for which the unit status is average.

These are placed next in the current scheduled units file.

17) The same process is repeated (307) to add the alternative units not yet done.

18) The process is repeated (307) to add the alternative units done within the repeat number with unit status poor.

l9) The process is repeated (307) to add the alternative units done within the repeat number with unit status average.

20) The process is repeated (308) to add the extra units not yet done.

21) The process is repeated (308) to add the extra units done within the repeat number with unit status poor.

22) The process is repeated (308) to add the extra units done within the repeat number with the unit status average.

23) From the current Scheduled Units file, the program then discards (309) any units where the student ability grade is 10 and the exercise unit difficulty level is 7-10.

24) From the current file, the program then discards (309) any units where the student ability grade is 9 and the exercise unit difficulty level is 8-10.

25) From the current file, the program then discards (309) any units where the student ability grade is 8 and the exercise unit difficulty level is 9-10.

26) From the current file, the program then discards (309) any units where the student ability grade is 7 and the exercise unit difficulty level is 10.

The object of these selections is, with a smooth gradient, to remove from the main current schedule any exercises with which weaker students may struggle.

These may nevertheless be selected if there is time available in the secondary selection (see below).

27) For the primary units in the current file which have a unit status of poor, select (310), from the Exercise File, their associated support units via field 8 (Primary unit unique identifier). Select only support units which have been run 0-1 times, via field 6 (Number of time performed previously). Set field 4 (Unique sequence number) for each support unit to be the same as the parent primary unit. Add the selected support units to the current file.

28) Compare (311) the number of units now in the current file with the number of scheduled slots available. If there are too many units in the current file, drop (312) the appropriate number from the end of the current file. This process will now have ensured that only the highest priority units will have been selected if time is limited.

29) If the number of units in the current file is less than the number of scheduled slots available (311), units from the extract file which have not previously been selected are sorted (313) according to the following order: EU 7. Unit type (primary, alternative, extra & support) EU 5. Unit status (not yet run, poor, average, good) EU 6. Number of times performed previously EU 4. Unit sequence number.

A sufficient number of exercise units are taken from the front of this file and added (313) to the current file, to make up the number.

Thus so far a subset of exercise units has been selected that is related to the student's past performance. The system now orders these in a preferred manner as will be described below with reference to Figure 4: 30) Sort the current file (401) on the following fields: EU 11. Unit's school year EU 4. Unit sequence number (this is divided by 10 and the integer value taken) EU 7. Unit type (converted to Boolean I if support unit) EU 6. Number of times performed previously.

This sort will ensure that, if there is a mix of years, the earliest school year will be run first. The sequence number divided by ten will tend to keep units in their proper order but modified by the run frequency to push back repeats. The Boolean on unit type will ensure that support units always come before their primary units.

31) Add the postponed units to the end of the current file (402). Put the requested units at the head of the current file (403).

32) Check the first set of units in the current schedule against the last units performed in the Student History File (404). If the first scheduled unit is requested, or the first two are support plus primary, take no special action.

Otherwise, if the first scheduled is the same as the last one in the history file, swap around the first two units in the scheduled file. The purpose of this is to ensure that the student will not be set the same unit twice in a row.

33) Remove from the Student History File all units scheduled but not yet done and replace them with the new current schedule file (405).

The schedule in the Student History File is now ready to select the next unit to be revised and to provide a warning on the student's Home page if any important units have had to be dropped due to time constraints.

Thus, although the best place to learn maths is in the classroom with experienced teachers, the system described here can provide a very effective method of setting and marking practice exercises. Students may not get sufficient practice at school or through homework. This system with its ability to set a multiplicity of questions, and with its on-line help and instant feedback as to accuracy, may be the very next best method of providing practice to complement classroom activities.

With such a designed computer system, containing a comprehensive set of exercises, coupled with students being able to set aside a few minutes time a few times per week, it may well be that a school pupil will tackle at home as many practice questions with the system (a few minutes a few times per week) as he will at school in all his lessons and with his homework, with the concomitant improvement in skills level.

Teachers are thus able to concentrate on teaching and setting tests etc. while the system looks after the practice and revision.

With a large number of topics to practice, but with the available student time at a premium, the system optimises a student's study plan. The student's weaker areas will be identified by the system and the system will ensure that no topic is neglected or alternatively overemphasized at the cost of others. The aim is to strive to maximise the student's mark in any upcoming exam.

Although it is capable of being applied to other complex re-iterative scheduling and feedback tasks, and indeed to other academic subjects, the programme has found its first application in school maths revision. It is a general tool designed to ensure that pupils derive the maximum from their self-study and revision efforts.

The programme attempts to ensure that no matter how many exercises are entered into the system, as long as they are all properly coded along the lines mentioned above, the system will always be able to organise the set work in the most appropriate sequence for the student. The system is thus capable of providing a highly efficient and cost-effective way of managing a student's revision.

The system is conceived as a program stored on the hard disk of a personal computer associated with the student. Answers may be sent to a teacher electronically, for instance via the Internet. Other applications may also be used in conjunction with the system described; for example a whiteboard application to provide a flexible yet ergonomic method of presenting questions and accepting answers.

The schedule produced is stored in the student's record along with his past history. This can be reviewed by parents or teachers as required.

If the program detects that significant parts of the curriculum need to be omitted from the student's schedule, because of time constraints, it may post a notice on the student's homepage. This provides an opportunity for the student to increase the number and duration of session times if this is deemed appropriate.

it is important to note that the program itself does not make any value judgements. These are defined by the Exercise unit parameters and the system then works in accordance with the ratings which have been set.

A student may start using the system late on in a school year or may need completely to revise a previous year, before starting the current year's work. In circumstances such as these, the system works in project mode. Here, the period available may be considerably shorter than the whole school year. If so the system wild prioritise certain exercises over others, will set more units into the period available and allow fewer or even no repeats so that a general revision program can be provided in the relevant time frame allowed.

Work can be discontinued and re-started at any time, with the system itself carrying out all re-estimating in order to bring the student's study plan back on track.

The system itself carries out all appraisals, estimates, re-scheduling etc automatically. The resulting schedule is available for review and change by the student, parents, tutor or teachers.

In normal mode the student will be set one or two exercise units per day, each of which taking no more than 5-10 minutes. The student agrees with his parents/teacher and inputs into the system how much time he can realistically manage each week. The time period chosen should be sustainable and obviously not excessive. However, this figure may be revised at any time. A single exercise unit, particularly for smaller children, may last as little as S minutes. If the student is able to spend more time per session, it may be possible to divide the time into two or more exercise units, thereby allowing faster progress.

The session time duration, expressed for example as "10 minutes per day, 4 days per week during term time" is then used by the system to schedule the exercise units throughout the term. The system uses a number of internal parameters and the increasingly detailed experience of the student's past performance to ensure that a suitable number of questions are set to match the time units available.

A typical exercise unit might be to practice first steps in counting by, say, adding 1, 2 or 3 to sets of numbers, or addition with units carry, subtracting with regrouping, telling the time, the 7-times table, recognising lines of symmetry, reading off figures from bar charts, rounding numbers to a given number of decimals, arithmetic using compound fractions, solving pairs of simultaneous linear equations, working out the area of a number of plane figures, re-computing averages based on additional trials, etc. Once the first one or two questions have been completed, those that follow are pure practice in speed and accuracy.

The incorporation of new exercise units into the system, the modification of existing units, and the allocation of a unit to the appropriate school year or years, and the time that a particular unit should take, may be undertaken at any time.

One further potentially significant advantage with the system lies in its ability to fill in gaps in understanding between concepts. Every school must always set children work at a pace which will allow the curriculum for that year to be covered. This may result in a student having a number of serious gaps in comprehension concerning material which was "covered" perhaps one or even several years previously. Similarly, a child may have managed to do the classwork and homework from a previous year without actually understanding what it was all about. There may not be time available at school to re-visit these areas. For example, a child may be busy this year doing higher additions, without actually having any proper grasp of the order of larger numbers- so a child may know how mechanically to add 1458+2384, but may not be able when asked to suggest any number between those numbers. The system should be able to recognise these sorts of problems and build time into the revision system to re- visit the areas concerned.

The system removes the burden from teachers, parents or tutors in the sense that it sets the most appropriate practice exercises for each student at each given study period. Whenever the student clicks on the revision or homework button, the system instantly reviews the situation and presents the next set of exercises to be carried out.

Thus the system presents the student with a practice program over the longer term which will best suit his needs. It is a key feature of the system that this occurs automatically, without requiring any manual intervention.

Given the parameters involved, and the hundreds of exercises units, the system provides a way of ordering and setting appropriate revision schedules. The system should be able to serve thousands of students and teachers, for many academic years, with appropriate combinations of thousands of potential exercise units. In addition, there will inevitably be changes in circumstances a student may progress more slowly or quickly than expected, time will be lost as a result of illness or some other activity. Certain exercise units may have to be repeated more frequently than expected. The time available to study per week may have been revised upwards or downwards. For some poorly performed units, special backup units may have to be introduced. The student, parents, tutor or teacher may request an override of the system to emphasise certain units. Some units may have to be postponed until the student has dealt with them in school. To remain effective, therefore, the system constantly reviews the schedule and brings it up-to-date automatically.

The program provides the capability to organise the available resources of the revision material and the student's time.

The program has been invented to handle this complex algorithmic matching of student to exercise unit to time slot, in order to ensure an optimal scheduling and it seeks to ensure that the latest best schedule is available each time the student is ready to do the next unit. It will in principle carry out this setting of the work better than a manual procedure is capable of doing, assuming the accuracy of the given set of parameters. In addition, the system should never run out of appropriate units to set.

For every student and revision session, the program picks the most appropriate exercise for the student's current position in his overall revision program, bearing in mind how many units he must cover in the time available, how he has been progressing so far, what further gains can be expected from re-doing previous exercises etc. Working on a time scale of one academic year each student may ideally have approximately 300-350 slots for exercise units (150 revision days, 2 times 4 minute slots per day). Into these must be introduced a selection from some 150-250 exercises. They must be identified in an appropriate order and then repeated, moved, skipped or re-introduced as the student's year progresses.

The program makes up the schedule entirely from scratch each time the revision button is clicked by the student on his homepage. The scheduling is reworked instantly and automatically depending on today's date, the past history, the remaining days in the program, current session time and other parameters. The completed schedule is stored and the first unit on the list becomes the next unit the student is set.

Homework Mode The system as described above relates to a revision mode, in which a student is automatically presented with revision work, extra exercises, revising for exams etc. Using the unit exercises available, plus general inputs from the student and teacher/tutor and ongoing performance, the system is able to guide a student through the extra revision work required.

In another aspect of the invention, there is provided the functionality to assist a teacher in setting a specific set of questions to be done by his/her class on a given date i.e. for setting homework. The teacher is provided with a quick and simple method to enter the exercises and to have the homework sent to the class, set or even individual student concerned, have the students do the work, and have the work sent back to him/her. A summary of the results may be provided in a convenient manner so any necessary action may be taken. A teacher may want to set up homework many days in advance, or modify at late notice what has been set etc. 1) Homework setting This will be described with reference to Figure 5. The teacher sets up a number of homework units in the system. This is done by choosing from the large pool of exercise units in the system. A given exercise unit will supply any required number of questions all of a given defined type, as described earlier in relation to the revision mode of the system. The exercise units available to the teacher on a school system are the standard ones supplied by the system (as described above), plus any additional ones, perhaps supplied from other co-operating schools or some specially designed and entered into the system by the teacher.

By selecting one or more of these exercise units, the teacher builds up a set of question-generating program instructions in the system, called a homework unit.

The system helps the teacher choose between potentially several thousand units in the system. For instance, the selection may be narrowed down to units suitable for the given school year, class level, term time and subject matter etc. The teacher then inputs parameters which identify the exercise units that are required (501). This parameter may be the Unique Identifier as described above. This may be inputted by the teacher, via a user interface, clicking on an icon or the like which relates to the exercise unit of interest.

A teacher will typically only choose 1-3 exercise units for a given night's homework. Say the teacher decides on three units for a given night. The teacher then decides on the total time to be spent on the homework and the proportion of time to be spent on each exercise unit. The teacher then enters this as a another parameter (502). Say the teacher wants the homework to take approximately 30 minutes altogether with the questions shared out time-wise in the proportion 3, 4 and 5 between the three units.

The teacher may then enter a parameter relating to the exercise units (503). For instance, this might be the expected average grade of the class in question as this will affect the average time per question.

In response to these parameters, the system (504) dynamically generates a set of exercises from the identified exercise units (in this case, the three units).

This dynamic generation of exercises may involve the variables of the exercises e.g. for an exercise unit of the format x+y=z, the variables for x and y for each of the exercises to be presented may be generated and stored. This would mean that all students attempting the homework unit would be presented with exercises with the same variables. Preferably therefore when this homework unit is activated (i.e. executed by the system) e.g. by the student or teacher, a set of questions with pre-determined variables will be presented on the screen for answering. The teacher thus knows what homework is set, and all students eventually doing this homework will get the same material. It is up to the teacher what he/she puts into a homework unit, the degree of difficulty and how long it is expected to take etc. Alternatively, the variables for the exercises may be dynamically generated by the student's computer when the homework unit is carried out. This latter embodiment means that the set of exercises presented to each student may differ. The teacher may prefer this option in cases, for instance, where a class has a tendency to copy an individual's answers.

The system is able to supply average question times, degree of difficulty etc for each of the units involved, to help with this process. The system will provide a predicted average time to do the whole homework unit plus an expected average mark.

The set of questions generated may also be dependent upon the particular person or person(s) for whom the homework is set. Thus the system can set exercises from selected exercise units and determine the complexity of the exercise on the basis of the past performance of a person or persons (e.g. a 1 0 class).

The teacher may adjust the units, share and settings until she is happy the homework unit is suitable for its purpose.

The teacher gives this homework unit a unique ID and title and it is saved in the system (505). These homework units could also be shared by schools, recommended by education authorities etc. and pooled in many other ways. So pre-designed homework units may be defined by experts as particularly suitable for certain purposes.

The homework unit actually is a set of programming instructions stored in the system which when executed by the system will present the questions on the students' screens, plus answers and help texts.

2) Homework Order This will be described with reference to Figure 6. Once the homework units have been set up, the teacher can then produce a homework order by associating a homework unit with a given day in a year (601) and child/set/class of students (602), to provide an actual homework order for one or more students to do.

Thus a homework order consists of one or more lines of the following three features: homework unit, date, student.

Examples:

SMITH/ALG05,231002,HEBR4J SMITH/AL2,251002,D3 SMITH/GEO2,251002,D3A In the first of these order lines, Mrs Smith has set a homework "Algebra 5" to one bright pupil Henry Brown (student ID HEBR4J) to be done on 23.10. 2002.

In the second order line she has set homework "Algebra 2" for her whole class D3 on 25.10.2002. Finally she has set for the same day 25.10.2002 a special homework "Geometry 2" for the special set D3A in class D3. D3A will do Geometry that evening, not Algebra like the rest of the class.

One or more of these lines (triples of homework, date, students) can then be saved as a homework unit order in the system. It can be submitted to the system at any time for activation.

The teacher has help to establish these sets of triples: - a diary system with appropriate homework dates, - the list of homework units available (or subsets selected relevant to the set of students in hand), - a list of individual students, or sets, class groupings and classes.

The teacher builds up his/her order by suitably clicking between these three lists. He/she can edit the list in the usual manner. He/she will not have to painstakingly type in homework unit ID's, student names and dates. With a single click she would for example be able to associate a homework unit to a whole class etc. The homework order is given a unique ID and title in the system and is saved (603).

An homework order could be a single line setting up a special homework unit for a specific student, or a whole year's homework for a given class in the teacher's charge. Last year's order could be reused this year by simply editing the dates.

IS A full one-year homework order for a class in which all in the class take the same homework, twice a week, will consist of only about 60-70 lines of triples of homework-ID, date and student-grouping.

At any time during the ordering process the teacher can look at a given homework unit to confirm it is the one that is wanted.

3) Issuing homework orders An existing homework order can then be issued (604) i.e. submitted to the system.

Each time a student in the particular school system accesses the system, any current issued homework orders are downloaded to the student's PC and are examined for relevance to the student in question. A line in a given order (triple of homework unit, date, student/class) is

relevant to the student if the date of the order line is equal to or after current date, and the student/class ID refers to the student. If it is relevant, the order line is incorporated into the student's own diary on his PC. When the student clicks on the homework button for the appropriate day, the homework will be there to do. Results will be sent back to the school centre.

A new order line will overwrite an existing order for the date in question in the student's diary. An individual order line will overwrite a set order which will overwrite a class order line.

Special order lines An order line with a "X" in the homework ID column will remove any other entry that was there previously in the student's diary, and leave that as a homework-free day.

An order line with a special homework marker "*" in the homework ID column will remove anything that was there previously, but leave the indicator showing the student that homework is intended to be set for that date.

With this simple set of instructions it should be possible for the teacher easily to manipulate what homework the students in a class are set. As described above, this does not however allow more than one homework unit to be set for a given student on a specific night. However it is envisaged that this may be a requirement and this could be implemented in a number of ways e.g. by including a further parameter for each order or only allowing over-writes or deletion of homework units that share the same initial string of a homework unit e.g. in the examples given above the string ALG or GEO etc. The technique will for instance allow a teacher quite quickly to set up for a whole year the standard homework units for a class prior to start of the year, but still allow the teacher to modify the orders because of previous outcome, for different students etc. 4) Downloading updates to a student's homework diary.

When a student accesses the system, the student's system accesses the school centre to check if there are any updates relevant to him.

Students with no remote access to the school system (e.g. no internet access) would have to take the original term or year order home on a diskette and take a further diskette each time the teacher made any change relevant to this student.

5) Clicking the Homework Button If the homework button is clicked, the system examines the student's homework diary on the student's machine. If there are any un-started or un finished homework units in the diary with dates on or prior to the current date, these will be displayed for action by the student.

A student can choose to start or continue with any of the homework units in the list. Of course, if the student has been doing the homework on time and in the right order, only homework for the current day should come up and the student will be sent to it.

At any time a student can leave a homework unit as unfinished for a variety of reasons - too long, too difficult, etc. He can leave this homework with the status "finished with" even though there may be some questions outstanding.

He can leave the homework with the status "partially completed, to be finished later". If there are no questions left to answer the status is of course "fully completed".

Like all unit exercises in the system, the questions in the system have hints, help text and an answer button if the student gets stuck.

If the student clicks the homework button and there is no work due or outstanding, the next homework will pop up in case this is an acceptable option i.e. to allow a student to work ahead of schedule.

Rules as to how much homework a student may leave, whether a student should complete previous homework before starting new material, whether a student is allowed to work ahead etc. will be up to the teacher and class concerned, the system can accommodate the alternatives.

The results are sent back to the centre at regular or relevant intervals.

Preferably this will be done automatically each time a homework order is completed. Again a lot depends on the efficiency of the student's internet connection. If using a broadband connection to the internet, the material can be sent automatically every night the student works, with no waiting. If using a slow dial-up connection, this might perhaps take place once a week after the last homework period. If so, the student may have to spend a few minutes connecting to the internet and sending back the results.

The system is so designed that it could be run entirely across the internet i.e. there is no sending back and forth, the student is logged on as it were to the school system from home. However the speed of internet connection will influence the attractiveness of this implementation.

With no internet connection at all, the student would have to bring back his results on a diskette and load it onto the school centre.

6) Checking the homework results Homework results are sent back from each student. The results are sent back at the individual question level for each homework. The results for each question give the time taken, how many times the question was wrongly answered, whether the correction was correctly answered, whether the hint or help button was used etc. These individual question results can be processed by the system teacher module to see an overall score and other statistics for each student in the class.

The system can highlight missing homework, worryingly bad performances, exceptional performances etc. The system can also grade the student on performances-to-date as well as for this individual homework.

The teacher may be able to carry out various data analysis processes on the data, for instance to see whether a particular question caused a lot of problems.

This may help a teacher to assess whether the exercise unit was poor, the help text poor or whether this reflects a need to go over this question or exercise again in class.

Although the invention has been described with reference to the teaching of mathematics, it should be apparent to a person skilled in the art that the teachings of the invention may be applied to other areas of education and it is intended that the invention system may also be applicable to such areas. s

The scope of protection sought is set out in the accompanying set of claims. It is intended that features as claimed may be implemented separately or combined together in any suitable manner as may other features set out in the

description.

Claims (31)

1. Claims 1. Apparatus for scheduling educational exercises for a student,

   the apparatus being arranged to: select for a particular student a group of exercise units dependent upon at least one parameter relating to the student, and from the selected group of exercise units, select a subset of exercise units which meet at least one predetermined criterion based on the student's past performance.
2. 2. Apparatus according to claim 1 wherein the apparatus is further arranged periodically to carry out the selection of the group and the subset for the student.
3. 3. Apparatus according to claim 1 wherein the apparatus is further arranged to carry out the selection of the group and the subset each time the student indicates the intention to begin an exercise session.
4. 4. Apparatus according to claim l wherein the pre-determined criterion relates to one or more of the following: the number of times the student has previously attempted the exercise unit; the type of exercise unit; a measure of success the student has achieved previously with respect to the exercise unit; the difficulty of the exercise unit.
5. 5. Apparatus according to claim 1 wherein the apparatus is further arranged to: order the exercise units within the subset according to a second pre determined criterion.
6. 6. Apparatus according to claim 5 wherein the second predetermined criterion relates to one or more of the following: the academic year allocated to the exercise unit; a sequence number of the exercise unit; the type of support unit; the number of times the student has previously attempted the exercise unit.
7. 7. Apparatus according to claim 1 wherein the apparatus is further arranged to: add further exercise units to the subset which further exercise units represent support units for an exercise unit that indicates a low measure of success the student has achieved previously with respect to the exercise unit.
8. 8. Apparatus according to claim 1 wherein the apparatus is further arranged to: determine if the number of exercise units in the subset meets a given threshold and, if the number of exercise units in the subset is equal to or greater than the given threshold, to select a number of exercise units that meets the threshold and, if the number of exercise units in the subset is less than a given threshold, to add to the subset further exercise units from the group of exercise units to meet the threshold.
9. 9. A method for scheduling educational exercises for a student, the method comprising: selecting for a particular student a group of exercise units dependent upon at least one parameter relating to the student, and from the selected group of exercises, selecting a subset of exercise units which meet at least one predetermined criterion based on the student's past performance.
10. 10. A method according to claim 9 further comprising periodically carrying out the selection of the group and the subset for the student.
11. 11. A method according to claim 9 further comprising: carrying out the selection of the group and the subset each time the student begins an exercise session.
12. 12. A method according to claim 9 wherein the pre-determined criterion relates to one or more of the following: the number of times the student has previously attempted the exercise unit; the type of exercise unit; a measure of success the student has achieved previously with respect to the exercise unit; the difficulty of the exercise unit.
13. 13. A method according to claim 9 further comprising: ordering the units within the subset according to a second pre determined criterion.
14. 14. A method according to claim 13 wherein the second predetermined criterion relates to one or more of the following: the academic year allocated to the exercise unit; a sequence number of the exercise unit; the type of support unit; the number of times the student has previously attempted the exercise unit.
15. 15. A method according to claim 9 further comprising: adding further exercise units to the subset which further exercise units represent support units for an exercise unit that indicates a low measure of success the student has achieved previously with respect to the exercise unit.
16. 16. A method according to claim 9 further comprising: determining if the number of exercise units in the subset meets a given threshold and, if the number of exercise units in the subset is equal to or greater than the given threshold, selecting a number of exercise units that meets the threshold and, if the number of exercise units in the subset is less than a given threshold, adding to the subset further exercise units from the group of exercise units to meet the threshold.
17. 17. A computer program for scheduling educational exercises for a student, the computer program comprising computer code for implementing the following steps: selecting for a particular student a group of exercises dependent upon at least one parameter relating to the student, and from the selected group of exercises, selecting a subset of exercises which meet at least one predetermined criterion based on the student's past 1 5 performance.
18. 18. A computer program according to claim 17, the computer program further comprising computer code for implementing the following steps: periodically carrying out the selection of the group and the subset for the student.
19. 19. A computer program according to claim 17, the computer program further comprising computer code for implementing the following steps: carrying out the selection of the group and the subset each time the student begins an exercise session.
20. 20. A method of scheduling and presenting exercises to a student, the method comprising: selecting for a particular student a group of exercise units dependent upon at least one parameter relating to the student; from the group of exercise units, selecting a first subset of exercise units, which first subset comprises those exercise units which have been performed before by the student fewer than a predetermined number of times; ordering the exercise units in the first subset according to at least one criterion; determining whether the number of exercise units in the first subset is less than a required number, and, if so, adding other exercise units from the group of exercise units and, if the number of exercise units in the first subset is greater than a required number, taking the top exercise units in the ordered first subset to meet the required number to form a second subset of exercise units; re-ordering the exercise units of the second subset according to a second criterion; and presenting the exercises to the student in the order determined by the re ordering step.
21. 21. A method according to claim 20 wherein the first subset of exercise units comprises those exercise units which have been performed by the student 2 or fewer times before.
22. 22. A method according to claim 20 further comprising placing at the top of the ordered first subset of exercise units one or more exercise units that are flagged as being required.
23. 23. A method according to claim 20 further comprising prior to ordering the first subset adding to the first subset support exercise units for any exercise units in the first subset that have a field that indicates that the exercise unit has not been performed satisfactorily by the student.
24. 24. A method according to claim 20 wherein the second criterion comprises one or more of the following: the type of exercise unit, the number of times the exercise unit has been performed by the student, an indication of how well the student has previously performed the exercise unit.
25. 25. A method according to claim 20 further comprising removing from the first subset those exercise units meeting criteria relating to the student's past performance of the exercise unit and an associated difficulty grade of the exercise unit.
26. 26. Homework setting apparatus comprising a database of a plurality of exercise units, each exercise unit defining a plurality of related exercises, and a computer program arranged to perform the following steps: to receive as input at least one first parameter, the first parameter identifying an exercise unit of the plurality of exercise units, to receive as input a second parameter relating to the time to be spent on the homework and the proportion of time to be spent on each exercise unit identified by the first parameter, on the basis of the first and second parameters, to generate dynamically a set of exercises from the exercise units identified by the first parameter(s).
27. 27. Apparatus as claimed in claim 26 further arranged to receive as input a third parameter relating to a person or persons for whom the homework is to be set, the third parameter identifying the person(s) to whom the set of questions is to be presented.
28. 28. Apparatus as claimed in claim 26 further arranged to receive as input a fourth parameter relating to a date on which the homework is to be carried out, the apparatus being arranged to present the stored set of exercises to the person(s) on the date specified by the fourth parameter.
29. 29. Apparatus as claimed in claim 26 further arranged to generate variables for the exercises at the same time as generating the set of exercises.
30. 30. Apparatus as claimed in claim 26 further arranged to accept additions to the exercise units in the database of exercise units.
31. 31. A computer program comprising code for performing the steps of any one of the claims 26-32 when said program is run on a computer.

    31. Apparatus as claimed in claim 26 wherein the step of dynamically generating the set of exercises is also dependent upon the second parameter.

    32. A homework setting method for setting a set of exercises, each exercise being defined by an exercise unit from a database of a plurality of exercise units, each exercise unit defining a plurality of related exercises, the method comprising the following steps: receiving as input at least one first parameter, the first parameter identifying an exercise unit of the plurality of exercise units, receiving as input a second parameter relating to the time to be spent on the homework and the proportion of time to be spent on each exercise unit identified by the first parameter, on the basis of the first and second parameters, dynamically generating a set of exercises from the exercise units identified by the first parameter(s) for presentation to a person or persons(s).