An educational rule-based expert system to determine water quality for environmental engineering and biotechnology students

Abstract

According to the latest estimates of the World Health organization (WHO), 842000 people die each year from diarrhea as a result of unsafe drinking-water as well as the lack of sanitation and hand hygiene. Therefore, it is essential to develop skills to determine water quality according to local and international standards. This situation becomes a critic issue in students of environmental engineering and biotechnology careers. For these reasons, in this paper, we present an educational tool aimed at supporting the training process related to water quality determination and measurement in these students. Our system relies on a rules-based reasoning module and interactive web and mobile interfaces that provide several guidelines for students. We tested the tool with 37 students, and the obtained results show high levels of acceptance as well as an index of 0.87 on Cronbach’s alpha.