CogSketch
People sketch to work through ideas and to communicate, especially when dealing with spatial matters. Software that could participate in sketching could revolutionize spatial education, and provide a new kind of instrument for cognitive science research, as well as being an important scientific advance in its own right. Our goal is to do the research and development needed to create a sketch understanding system that can be used as an instrument for cognitive science research and as a platform for educational software. This system, called CogSketch, will be one of the products of the Center. Our vision is that, in ten years or less, sketch-base educational software can be as widely available to students as graphing calculators are today. To achieve this vision will require tight collaboration between the AI researchers on the CogSketch development team and psychologists, learning scientists, and educators.
Main Project Page: http://www.silccenter.org/.../tool-sketching
Read This First:
System Requirements:
- Hardware: Tablet PC preferred, but not required. If you are using a desktop or a traditional notebook, we highly recommend adding an inexpensive Wacom tablet, because you will find it a lot easier to draw with a pen than with a mouse.
- Operating system: Microsoft Windows Vista / Windows 7 / Windows 8.
- CPU: At least 1.5 Ghz, 2 Ghz or better preferred.
- RAM: 1 GB minimum, 2 GB or more preferred.
- Disk Space: At least 1.5 GB free disk space is required.
Want to help scientists help you?
Researchers at the Spatial Intelligence and Learning Center (SILC)
are gathering a corpus of sketches using CogSketch. CogSketch is the sketch understanding software that we
are creating, which is available for free from our web site. It has two purposes.
First, we are using it to explore how people reason and learn. Second, we are exploring how to incorporate
sketching into education, to improve student learning. By gathering people's sketches, scientists will be
able to do analyses that will help them with both of these missions. If you want to participate, all you
have to do is download CogSketch, and indicate your acceptance when you install the
software. (If you change your mind, there is a "Phone Home" setting in the software preferences.)
CogSketch, version 2.22
-
Installer for version 2.22 (MS Windows) (404 MB) [4/23/2013] - The above link will take you to the form required to download the installers for
the latest version of CogSketch
- User Manual (3.2 MB) [4/23/2013]
- The User Manual is included in the installer above — this link is just
for those who would like to look at the manual without installing CogSketch.
- Spatial Reasoning Manual (0.5 MB) [6/27/2012]
- This document is included in the installer above — the link is just
for those who would like to look at the manual without installing CogSketch.
- Knowledge-Base for v2.22 (367 MB) [4/23/2013]
- The knowledge-base is also included in the installer above so you do not need to
download this separately. This is for those who want to restore their knowledge-base
to its original state. Download this file, unzip it, and choose "Restore Knowledge-Base"
from CogSketch' FIRE menu.
Individual Downloads
Troubleshooting
Revision History
New in v 2.22 (released 4/23/2013)
- You can now erase ink strokes with the new eraser tool!
New in v 2.21 (released 4/3/2013)
- You can now edit lattice properties.
- Support for relative inclination suggestions. This means that you can give advice about the angles of arrows in a specified range.
- Added a "Design Coach Data Export" option to the Experimenter menu. This takes a folder of design sketches and exports their data into a csv file, including the tell window overall description and sentences, sketch notes, the feedback design coach gives on that sketch and more.
- CogSketch is now available in both 32- and 64-bit versions.
New in v 2.20 (released 3/19/2013)
- CogSketch now uses single-click zoom in -- clicking the zoom in button zooms by a fixed amount, keeping the current view centered. Previously, you dragged a box to determine which region to zoom. You can still use the old zoom style if you wish -- simply uncheck "Enable single-click zoom in" in the Preferences.
- The various cursors have been improved so they work on high resolution screens, like that of the Microsoft Surface Pro.
- Generating tutor feedback with shape and edge representations of glyphs now uses a hierarchical approach, working its way from glyphs, to shapes within the glyphs, to the edges within the shapes. This allows the tutor to be more targetted in the advice generated and improves the quality of the analogies made to the teacher's solution.
- When designing new worksheets, you can now define your own collections and relations.
- When adding lattices to a sketch, you can now disable cells within the lattice if desired.
- Fixed a bug in Design Coach sentence construction in the Tell window involving force arrows. Currently there are no verbs which take force arrow annotations as subjects or objects.