Drawing Dynamic Geometry Figures Online with Natural Language for Junior High School Geometry

Abstract

This paper presents a tool for drawing dynamic geometric figures by understanding the texts of geometry problems. With the tool, teachers and students can construct dynamic geometric figures on a web page by inputting a geometry problem in natural language. First we need to build the knowledge base for understanding geometry problems. With the help of the knowledge base engine InfoMap, geometric concepts are extracted from an input text. The concepts are then used to output a multistep JavaSketchpad script, which constructs the dynamic geometry figure on a web page. Finally, the system outputs the script as an HTML document that can be visualized and read with an internet browser. Furthermore, a preliminary evaluation of the tool showed that it produced correct dynamic geometric figures for over 90% of problems from textbooks. With such high accuracy, the system produced by this study can support distance learning for geometry students as well as distance learning in producing geometry content for instructors.

Keywords:

• Natural language understanding,
• Dynamic geometry,
• JavaSketchpad,
• Geometry education,
• Knowledge construction