Learning does not follow linear paths. As soon as you grasp one concept, other learning oppor- tunities become intrinsically accessible. Common digital educational platforms do not reflect this fact in their software. Courses are laid out in a linear way and only take prior knowledge into account by looking at what the student has learned right before the current task. Even offline courses like traditionally held lessons in schools often go along a linear path. They possibly start with an introduction, followed by a teacher’s input, an exercise frame and end with a summary and outlook. The students probably have no clue how the granularly learned contents might help them to deal with more complex problems.
This app "AdaMap" implements a learning layout which takes prior knowledge into account and recommends further learning steps to take based upon all learning nodes a student has visited yet. The app is a prototype for a tool which should encourage students to explore a topic by travelling on a map node by node. On the highest zoom level of the map (the most detailed view), nodes can be regarded as tasks. The visit of a node has prerequisite nodes, which must be completed first. The completion is marked as done after an offline or online assessment. After successful completion of a task, new tasks are offered on the map and the learning can continue.
The app is built with:
- Ruby on Rails v7.0.4 (web framework)
- Tailwind CSS v3.2.7 (CSS framework)
- LeaderLine (JS library)
- PostgreSQL v14.6 (database system)
- Sublime Text Build 4143 (code editor)
- GitHub(code repository platform)
- Ruby v3.2 (programming language)
- JavaScript(programming language)
- HTML (markup language)
- Git v2.32.1 (version control language)