Description
The Expert System for Thermodynamics (TEST) is a web application that is developed to help educators create thermodynamic engineering problems and for the students to analyze and solve the problems to gain knowledge in the thermodynamics field. The TEST web application is categorized into 15 chapters. TEST is used as effective and efficient educating medium around the world with thousands of students and educators registered with the web application. Because of the large number of students and educators accessing the TEST web application, servers are located through out the world that makes sure a secure connection is established to cater to the user requests. The type of registered users on TEST has been categorized into three types viz. Students, Educators and Administrators apart from the unregistered Guest users. The Guest users can just browse through the problems but cannot solve them and no history is maintained for these users. The aim of this thesis is to provide the educators an effective interface to edit the problem attributes that makes the thermodynamic engineering problems more understandable to the students and guides the students to gain knowledge in the predefined outcomes (knowledge areas). The outcomes are categorized as follows: (1) free body diagram, (2) mass equation, (3) energy equation, (4) entropy equation, (5) ideal gas model, (6) basic cycle concept, and (7) unit conversion, etc. In this thesis the problems has been divided into three types: Classic, Grade Me and Key problems. The educators can split the answer into parts if the answer to a particular problem has more than one answer. Successful solving of Key problems by students will guide them to solve more problems in the particular outcome to gain more knowledge. As the students solve the problems, there score is updated into the database by which the student can see his score in various outcomes on the TEST website. The educator can also provide notes to the students for successful or wrong solutions, so that the students can take further steps based on the notes provided by the educator. The technologies used in the development of this thesis are CSS, JavaScript, JSON, PHP and MYSQL. CSS is used to handle the styling part of the editor, JavaScript is used to dynamically create the editor, JSON format is used for problem's attributes to be stored into the MYSQL database and PHP is used as server side language. Finally educators, who used TEST in their engineering thermodynamics classes, will be requested to share the grade of students (anonymously). If we can compare students who used SMS with those who did not and show that SMS made a difference, this will change the word as far as thermodynamics education goes.
