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/working_groups/sketch_index.html
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 XP / Vista. It should still run on Windows 2000 but that has not been tested.
- RAM: At least 1GB, 2 GB 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 1.17
-
Installer for version 1.17 (427 MB) [11/8/2009]
- The above link will take you to the form required to download the installer for
the latest version of CogSketch
- User Manual (1.8 MB) [11/8/2009]
- 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.
- Knowledge-Base for v1.17 (400 MB) [11/8/2009]
- 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.
Revision History
New in v1.17:
- Improved representation and justifications for glyphs that represent relations. This leads to better analogies, among other things.
- Automatically generated namestrings for relations now give more information. Gives better feedback to user about what CogSketch thinks the relation represents.
- Improved handling of analogies involving qualitative directions.
- Bug Fix: In exported ink files, timestamps no longer end in "d0".
- Bug Fix: When using Mass Image Export, background images had not been included in the exported images. This has been fixed.
New in v1.16:
- When rendering thin lines (currently defined to be less than 2 pixels in width), OpenGL lines will be used. When rendering thicker lines, OpenGL polygons will be used. On computers that support full-screen anti-aliasing, you won't notice much of a difference. But some computers with lower quality graphics processors only support line anti-aliasing, so this change will improve the appearance of thin lines while still giving the advantages of polygons for thicker lines.
- Lines used on the Voronoi and Positional layers will now always be one pixel wide. Rendering speed for these layers has also been improved.
- Ink- and voronoi- processor crashes and restarts are now recorded in the sketch history. This is mainly to help with debugging and these events are not included in the history export files.
- Worksheet designers can now control whether or not the Tutor/Feedback button is available.
- Worksheet designers can now control whether or not users can assign their own namestrings to glyphs.
- Worksheet solutions can now be password-protected.
- Worksheet designers can have the tutor give advice based on quantitative ink comparisons to the solution.
- Worksheet designers can lock glyphs in the workspace, preventing students from moving, rotating, resizing, deleting, changing the conceptual label, or changing the namestring.
- Improved arrow interpretation.
- Inferences from annotations are now justified in an improved way. Also such inferences are now automatically recomputed if they depend upon the ink in the annotation glyph and/or the glyphs annotated. So, for example, if an annotation depends upon the direction of a glyph that looks like an arrow, and that glyph is then rotated, the inference about the arrow's direction will be automatically redone.
- Improved analogies used by the tutoring process.
- Worksheet designers can now control whether or not the tutor warns students about extra glyphs that they may have drawn. This is independently controllable for each acceptable collection, relation, and annotation. So, for example, a teacher may allow students to draw extra rock layers but have the tutor generate warnings if the student draw extra faults.
- Improved tutoring suggestions about missing entities.
- Tutor can generate suggestions about glyphs that have not been labelled (i.e those for which the student has not told CogSketch what they represent).
- CogSketch can send sketches via email. Related to this, users can opt-in to have CogSketch automatically send us their sketches to improve our research data.
New in v1.15:
- Fixed a bug in the Backup and Restore Knowledge-Base menu options — fileutils.fasl was not being included in the executable build, so users would get an error message when they attempted to backup or restore the KB.
- Backup Knowledge-Base remembers which folder you selected so that Restore Knowledge-Base can use that as a default to make it easier for you to find your backup.
- If Software Developer Mode is enabled in the preferences, the following options will now appear on the Development menu even when no sketch is active (previously you had to open a sketch before you could see these options): KQML Server Status, Memory Status, and Threads
- Previously, when CogSketch attempted to show a web page (when showing knowledge about a glyph, for example), if a browser window was already active, sometimes it would not display the newly requested page. This now works more reliably.
- Under some conditions, drawing line-segments on the voronoi layer could cause a crash. This has been fixed.