Grasple’s mission is to make STEM learning accessible. The University of Twente already uses Grasple in its math courses. But what about other STEM subjects? Can Grasple be used as an effective education tool in engineering education, for example?
Pieter Roos certainly thinks so!
- Pieter Roos presenting his findings on Grasple’s potential for engineering education at the University of Twente.
Pieter is associate professor in Civil Engineering at the University of Twente. He specifically enjoys the combination of academic research and teaching. Within Civil Engineering, he is responsible for the more technical courses, such as Fluid Mechanics in the BSc and Mathematical Physics in the MSc. Pieter was elected five-time teacher of the year in Civil Engineering, and is a proud winner of the University of Twente’s Central Educational Award in 2017. Recently, he was a Senior Teaching & Learning Fellow (2022-2024), enabling him to test his educational innovations in an evidence-informed manner.
As part of his fellowship, he cleverly incorporated Grasple into his course on fluid mechanics, taking an innovative approach to Grasple’s conditional logic and subquestion systems to create a fully scaffolded learning experience for his 1st year students. His approach not only reinforces class concepts through asking students to apply their knowledge to new problems, but actively encourages independent learning.
Pieter sat down with our CEO, Elisabeth, to share insights with us and other educators about his innovative approach to engineering education, his implementation of Grasple in his fluid mechanics course, and ways Grasple can become better suited to engineering education in the future.
As a researcher and educator, Pieter is always looking to provide more resources and learning opportunities for his students. When he noticed that some students in his fluid mechanics course were falling behind, he took it upon himself to find a solution.
He explained that, “While the students weren’t lacking self-study materials, they seemed to be missing some form of interactive feedback outside the regular lectures and tutorials. So I thought to myself ‘There must be a better way. Maybe an online tool is the answer,’ and that’s when I found Grasple.”
Pieter recognized the potential for Grasple to help supplement his students’ learning by providing engaging and challenging practice materials they could use outside of the classroom.
“The goal was never to replace lectures or tutorials. Rather, I wanted to add another tool to the students’ toolboxes for learning and working with the class concepts.”
While Grasple is widely used within the University of Twente for math, Roos saw its potential for engineering education.
“In my view, there’s a significant amount of overlap between engineering and math. While the two subjects differ in a variety of ways (see figure below), the key similarity being the fact that practice is essential for success in both subjects. So I saw the potential in leveraging the step-by-step problem solving offered by a math tool in teaching engineering.”
- Pieter’s vision of the similarities and differences between math and engineering subjects.
“I heard about Grasple initially from some of my other colleagues. The key for me was ensuring my students didn’t need to learn a new system. Because Grasple is already integrated within Twente, many students are already familiar with it from their previous math courses. And even if they weren’t, the easy-to-use platform ensured they could get up to speed with it quickly.”
Pieter especially saw pedagogical potential in Grasple’s conditional logic or decision tree questions. This feature allows for a personalised learning journey, as a student’s answer to a given question will determine which question they receive next.
Usually, this means that, if the student is finding the concept difficult to grasp, they will be provided with more questions outlining the steps required to solve the problem in more detail to help reinforce the topic. If the student seems to have a good grasp of the material, on the other hand, they may be permitted to bypass some of these intermediary steps. In both cases, the goal is to prevent students from becoming demotivated by questions that are too difficult or too easy, and to provide a more personalised learning experience that fits their needs. For a full explanation of Grasple’s conditional logic feature, and a guide on how to create conditional logic questions for your course, check out this article.
Pieter implemented this functionality in a unique and innovative way. Rather than creating traditional conditional logic questions, he created a kind of “choose your own adventure” where students were asked general questions followed by more granular questions based on their initial answer. One such example is shown below.
Students were asked to identify one of several points of interest on an image of a two-liquid manometer — a tube with two open ends filled with oil and water that has a bend at the bottom and has both ends pointing upwards. Depending on the point of interest the student chose, they were subsequently provided with increasingly specific questions to solve in relation to that point of interest. Each student could, therefore, complete the activity in any order depending on which point of interest they chose first.
-One student’s journey through the conditional logic tree. This is one way a student might complete this problem and experience the conditional logic tree as a result of her initial choice. However, another student could also start from point A or point C and be presented with the same questions, just in a different order.
For example, this video shows the same question when starting at point C in the conditional logic tree:
Measuring Impact
Without assessing/measuring the results, it wouldn’t really be possible to know if including an interactive study tool in a course could have a positive impact on students or not. Therefore, Pieter decided to study Grasple’s effectiveness in his fluid mechanics course using an evidence-informed approach.
Pieter’s goal was to study two main questions:
While measuring success based on test scores or other performance related metrics may seem like the most logical way to track progress, they may not tell us as much as we’d like to think. As Pieter explained:
“There are simply too many factors to consider when using students’ grades as the success metric. Students and their grades can be affected by any number of factors that are impossible to control for. You'd have to compare the results of two different cohorts of students, one before developing the Grasple tool — in my case 2022 — and one after implementing it in —2023 and later. However, the circumstances and conditions in these groups vary in so many ways that it is impossible to account for. That’s why I turned to the students’ experiences with the tool. Did they actually use Grasple? What was their feedback about using Grasple? Did they consider Grasple an important factor in improving their understanding of class concepts?”
To effectively measure these more subjective metrics, Pieter developed an online survey and a small-scale panel session to evaluate students’ experiences on Grasple, focusing primarily on their assessment of Grasple’s impact on their understanding of class concepts and motivation to study outside of class.
“[...] I turned to the students’ experiences with the tool. Did they actually use Grasple? What was their feedback about using Grasple? Did they consider Grasple an important factor in improving their understanding of class concepts?” - Pieter Roos - Teaching and Learning Fellow, UTwente
The key insights from Pieter’s experiment were positive overall, especially on the student side. According to the survey, 92% of students used Grasple during the course.
The survey also shows that students were pleased with Grasple’s inclusion in their course, with the majority of students reporting that Pieter’s fluid mechanics exercises on Grasple:
The students’ overall impression of the platform was also positive with the majority of students agreeing that:
When discussing his work with his colleagues, Pieter found that some other educators shared the students’ enthusiasm about Gapsle and its potential for meaningful learning applications.
“My colleagues were impressed by the possibilities of Grasple’s conditional logic and subquestions that allow complex problems to be broken up into more manageable pieces. This allows for incremental learning and lets students build on what they already know. My colleagues from the math department, used to applying Grasple in a more short-exercise format, were impressed by the layering of questions and the ability to guide their students through the exercises step-by-step.
Pieter realised that his online support tool may also trigger skepticism with some of his colleagues.
“For example, one colleague said that it is the task of an academic student to find these resources by himself or herself.”
Other colleagues point to the difficulty of reducing the scaffolding, so that students can gradually come to the level of working more independently.
Pieter himself also realises that online tools, even if successful for the original purpose, can have undesired side effects. For example, a successful Grasple tool could lead to lowered attendance at his lectures and tutorials. The students would then miss out on some of the valuable social aspects of learning. Luckily, this did not happen in his Fluid Mechanics class.
“While it is true that it’s difficult to reduce the scaffolding of questions, it’s clear that using a blended learning approach has a positive effect on students and their learning outcomes. I see Grasple as a valuable tool for the early years of higher education. As students progress, however, they should become more independent and I see fewer benefits for students in upper-year bachelors programs, or master’s programs.”
Pieter also suggested that for Grasple to be a better tool for engineering and physics courses, some additional features would be required.
“The main missing piece is the ability to include physical units in the answer field of the questions. A quantitative answer to an engineering or physics problem always consists of three elements: a value, a precision using a certain number of significant digits, and physical units such as meters per second, if the answer is, for example, a flow velocity. In Grasple's current math-oriented format, this feature is logically not available. However, for engineering courses, where we also want to stimulate good practice, this is quintessential.”
Thijs Gilllebart, Grasple’s co-founder and CTO also weighed in on this and agrees with Pieter.
“Having the ability to create questions for students where they have to provide an answer including the units allows for a better learning experience, especially combined with specific feedback on either the value, precision and/or the units in the answer. Therefore, we have decided to start developing this feature and are collecting input from teachers at this moment."
“Grasple is a very promising tool for engineering education. It just needs a little extra to go from great to excellent.” - Pieter Roos - Teaching and Learning Fellow, University of Twente
“Having the ability to create questions for students where they have to provide an answer including the units allows for a better learning experience, especially combined with specific feedback on either the value, precision and/or the units in the answer. Therefore, we have decided to start developing this feature and are collecting input from teachers at this moment.” - Thijs Gillebaart - Grasple CTO & Co-Founder
Pieter’s work really stood out to us as not only a creative inspiration for other educators, but also as a fantastic success story for blended learning. Thanks to Pieter’s work, students benefit from a tailored online learning experience that supports their understanding of class concepts and improves their skills in fluid mechanics. This, in combination with in-class instruction, resulted in an overwhelmingly positive experience for Pieter’s fluid mechanics students. Pieter’s dedication to his students and his research demonstrate the value of blended learning approaches in making applied STEM subjects accessible.
In the future, we intend to continue broadening Grasple’s usability in various STEM subjects to further our goal of making math learning and literacy accessible for all. We’ll continue to work with Pieter and other teachers to co-develop solutions for improving Grasple’s suitability for applied, math-based subjects like physics, engineering and other STEM subjects. If you have feedback regarding any of Grasple’s features, please contact us at support@grasple.com.
If you’re as impressed with Pieter’s work as we are and you’d like to experience it for yourself, please create a FREE teacher account here and contact us at hello@grasple.com to gain access to his materials.
Want to be the next Pieter Roos and push the boundaries of what’s possible with Grasple? Try it out! If you’re a STEM teacher of any kind, experiment with Grasple to see if it’s the tool for your subject. Let us know how it goes and how we can support you. You might even be the next outstanding educator we feature on our blog!
Related Links & Further Reading:
Grasple’s conditional logic feature - https://help.grasple.com/en/articles/88229-how-to-create-a-decision-tree-with-logic-within-your-exercise
More examples of conditional logic used in courses: https://www.grasple.com/blog/grasple-community-teacher-days-edition-3
Examples of Grasple’s functionalities to inspire new teacher approaches: https://help.grasple.com/en/articles/88226-math-highlights-in-grasple