2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

A free, flexible, on-line homework platform has been developed which allows instructors to create their own custom homework assignments through a simple programming interface.

Engineering classes generally require many homework problems to give students an opportunity to exercise the skills presented in lectures. The textbooks contain problems for this purpose; however, students often have access to solution manuals, which reduces the effectiveness of the assignments. Handwritten homework and the effort required to manually grade it makes it difficult to assign large problem sets. Additionally, homework done on paper provides no immediate feedback as to the correctness of the responses, and therefore the students are forced to submit work in which they typically have little confidence.

Online, automatically graded homework is a potential solution for all of these issues. By allowing students to do their work online, the instructor is no longer burdened with the task of grading, and students receive immediate feedback so that they know exactly what they do and do not understand and therefore can seek the instructor's help before submitting their final work. Since most of the problems are mathematical in nature, it is possible to present each student with a numerically unique problem so that students cannot simply transcribe each other's answers.

Online platforms of this nature already exist; however, they have several limitations. Since they are associated with a textbook, they are based on the solutions manual and therefore, although the numbers in the problems can be changed, the solutions are well known online. These platforms are also inflexible for the instructors: they are unable to modify the problems and can only select from a limited problem set and for a limited selection of courses. These online platforms are also subscription services that are available at substantial cost to the student.

A free online platform that serves this purpose was developed through an Open Educational Resources grant and has been deployed in five engineering courses over three years. This platform allows the instructor to develop questions using a simple Python programming interface and allows the instructor to leverage all of the Python math and science libraries to formulate the solutions. It supports two types of questions: analysis and design. While the current online platforms focus mainly on analysis problems, this platform also allows engineering design problems where a set of parameters and design criteria are given and the student must provide values which satisfy the given specifications which is much more applicable to real world problems. The addition of the design problems and the power of the Python libraries makes this platform highly flexible and applicable to mathematically complex topics such as circuit analysis, signals and controls.

In this paper we will describe the platform, its programming interface and show its application to the courses in which it has been used.