Education is a very important process. We are all aiming to teach better. And in the 21st century, this means using computers to automate (and improve) as many aspects of teaching as possible.

There are many great teachers who are willing to explain to us how to teach better. The problem is that these explanations are usually formulated by using imprecise(“fuzzy”) words from natural language, such as “weak” “strong”, “difficult”. To translate these recommendations into precise teaching strategies, it is therefore important to use fuzzy logic techniques, techniques that were designed specifically to translate such fuzzy knowledge into precise terms.

Another reason why fuzzy techniques are useful is that when we evaluate the student’s success, we also often use natural-language words such as “very good”, “needs some work”, etc. To be able to automatically process this information, we also need to translate these words into precise terms.

In this book. we show that indeed, fuzzy techniques can help in all the stages of the teaching process, from teaching itself to curriculum design to assessment. What we did is just scratching the surface: there are many important education-related problems in which, in our opinion, fuzzy techniques can be used. Yes, one of the objectives of this book is to present the results but our main objective is, by showing that fuzzy techniques can help, to inspire further research in this direction. Let us all do our best and use fuzzy and other techniques to improve teaching even further!