This paper was presented in the prestigious 21st Human Computer Interaction International Conference which was held in Disney Swan Hotel, Florida US from 29 to 31 July 2019.
In this interesting piece of work, Dr Palani, who is a Reader in the School of Computing looked into understanding task difficulty for students using their brain data. Understanding how difficult a learning task is for a person allows teaching material to be appropriately designed to suit the person, especially for programming material. A first step for this would be to predict on the task difficulty level. While this is possible through subjective questionnaire, it could lead to misleading outcome and it would be better to do this by tapping the actual thought process in the brain while the subject is performing the task, which can be done using electroencephalogram. This objective was set out and it was shown that it is possible to predict easy and difficult levels of mental tasks when subjects are attempting to solve Java programming problems. Using a proposed confidence threshold, the authors obtained a classification performance of 87.05% thereby showing that it is possible to use brain data to determine the teaching material difficulty level which will be useful in educational environments.
The full paper can be found here.
DOI identifier
Image credit: HCI Conference 2019