The POET (Purdue Optimization modeling Education Tool) Project is creating, evaluating, and disseminating a web-based interactive learning environment for teaching students how to formulate valid and tractable optimization models. Optimization is a key component of an industrial engineering curriculum and an essential part of other areas of engineering, the natural sciences, and business administration; however, many students find it difficult to build effective optimization models. The project is gaining insights into how students learn mathematical optimization modeling in order to show that novice students can better formulate valid optimization models when provided with visualization tools for guiding self-assessment and enhancing conceptual understanding. The project is evaluating the effectiveness of visualization in learning optimization modeling skills through measures of student performance. The team is establishing a web-based platform to raise awareness of POET and is growing a network of students and instructors around the world who use and evaluate POET. The project brings together researchers and educators in operations research, mathematics education, and human-computer interaction. The educational insights produced by this work represent a significant step in helping instructors improve the teaching of optimization modeling.
