Learning by Sketching with CogSketch

Quite interesting idea.  I remember looking at the CogSketch platform.  Had not of thought of it as a learning method.  But many of us do learn visually, can this be a means to fill the learning gaps?   Does it work in contexts other than geology, that are less visual?   How do the analogy aspect work?

Helping Students Learn by Sketching
Sketch Worksheets software analyzes and provides feedback on student sketches

Northwestern University professor Ken Forbus and his team have developed Sketch Worksheets, software that helps students learn via sketching exercises and also provides on-the-spot feedback by analyzing sketches and comparing them to the instructor's drawings. The software is founded on CogSketch, an artificial intelligence platform previously developed in Forbus' lab that employs visual-processing algorithms to automatically replicate and understand human-drawn sketches. 

Sketch Worksheets' comparisons of student and instructor sketches are conducted by an analogy model, in which students and instructors apply conceptual labels to their sketches to represent relationships among the drawings' different components. Forbus says CogSketch uses analogy to compare labels and give feedback. Geoscientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison used Sketch Worksheets to devise a set of 26 sketches that cover topics in introductory classes. "This is a step in creating software that can communicate with people as flexibly as we communicate with each other," Forbus says. .... " 

See the tag below for more research information regarding Ken Forbus, previously mentioned.