Picture Preview Generation for Interactive Educational Resources

With the development of network technology, many online educational resource platforms have emerged, and the number of resources on these platforms is increasing dramatically. Compared with the traditional resources, the interactive educational resources (IERs) have hidden interactive information and dynamic content. Only when the users perform interactive operations correctly can they acquire the knowledge conveyed by the resources, which makes it a challenge to help the users understand the general content of resources and find the resources that they are interested in. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a method for generating picture previews of IERs. Firstly, we analyze the file that stores interactive resource information, obtain the interactive elements’ information, extract the dependencies, and generate an operation sequence. Secondly, we execute the operation sequence using an automated software tool to mimic the interaction process between the user and the resource and save the screenshots in the process to generate a picture preview of an IER. We apply this method to a dynamic geometry platform, NetPad, and conduct experiments. Experimental results demonstrate that the method can effectively extract interactive semantic information and simulate the interactive process, and the generated picture previews are of great help to the users to understand the content of IERs.