Int J Serious Games

Procedural generation of problems for elementary math education

Yi Xu, Roger Smeets, and Rafael Bidarra

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Mathematics education plays an essential role in children’s development, and there aremany online applications aimed at supporting this process. However, manually creat-ing math problems with a variety of textual and visual content is very time-consumingand expensive. This article presents a generic approach for procedural generation ofmathematical problems, including their corresponding textual representations. The con-tent generation process consists of two phases: abstract math problem generation andtext generation. For the generation of abstract math problems, we propose a generictemplate-based method that operates across a variety of difficulty-levels and domains,including arithmetic, comparison, ordering, mathematical relationships, measurement,and geometry. Subsequently, we propose a multi-language adaptive textual content gen-eration pipeline to realize the generated abstract math problems into semantically co-herent text questions in natural language. A workflow time gain evaluation shows thatthe system yields an average time saving of 56%. Further, human expert evaluation ofthis approach indicates that the content it generates is sensible and solvable for primaryschool students.

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@article{bib:xu:2021,
    author       = { Xu, Yi and Smeets, Roger and Bidarra, Rafael },    
    title        = { Procedural generation of problems for elementary math education },
    journal      = { Int J Serious Games },
    volume       = { 8 },
    year         = { 2021 },
    pages        = { 49--66 },
    doi          = { 10.17083/ijsg.v8i2.396 },
    dblp         = { journals/ijsg/XuSB21 },
    url          = { https://publications.graphics.tudelft.nl/papers/90 },
}