An automatic correction tool for inorganic chemical formulas

The kernel of an automatic correction tool developed to practice exercises of nomenclature and formulation of inorganic chemistry at the technical/engineering degrees at Girona Polytechnic University is presented. Such tool consists on two parts: nomenclature and formulation. This tool was developed inside a previous e-learning platform that has two modules specially designed for the generation and correction of technical exercises. The exercise generation module, used to automatically generate different versions of a base exercise and the correction module, used to automatically correct the generated exercises by applying a solution code maintained in the base problem. We exploit the key of both modules that is the definition of the base exercise which varies according to the parameters and the descriptors. On the other hand, the usability of the interface developed for writing inorganic chemical formulas was decisive for the success of the tool. Our environment was tested during the last three academic years at the introductory course in chemistry in our university.