Mathbot as a Mathmatics Blended Learning Tool

Mathematics concepts are abstract. The famous mathematician, Poincare (1908/52) has already described impressively on students’ difficulties to understand mathematical ideas in the past century (Rosken, B. & Rolka, K., 2007). It is the subject that triggers the strongest negative feelings where students may establish and even result in an attitude of refusal towards mathematics, or may block their thinking processes (Buxton, 1981). Besides, students have difficulty to get individualized support and engage effectively with lecturer in large-scale class at universities (Brinton, Rill, Ha, Chiang, Smith, & Ju, 2015). Various studies shown that lack of individualized support tend to have weak learning outcomes, high dropout and dissatisfaction (Brinton et al., 2015; Eom, Wen, & Ashill, 2006; Hone & El Said, 2016). Conversational agents have the potential as the solution where they are computer programs engage a dialogue with human users in natural language for various purposes. Conversational agents are becoming a ubiquitous trend used in many fields. They are still at the beginning of expansion stage and will spread more in the education field (Chatbot’s Magazine 2017). Its implementation in education is still found very limited (Winkler, R. & Sollner, M., 2018) especially in Malaysia. This project is to design and to develop a conversational agent called Mathbot as an intelligent tutor to help students in learning mathematics and to evaluate the effect of using it as a blended learning tool on students’ mathematics achievement.