ADIS-an Animated Data Structure Intelligent Tutoring System on the WWW

Abstract

In today's information technology (IT) age, the traditional role of teachers and learners is being changed by multimedia courseware. Hypermedia offers much to learners in terms of providing an environment that engages the learner, allowing the construction of knowledge in a meaningful way. However, these packages lack intelligent tutors. Intelligent multimedia tutoring systems (IMTS) can offer some solutions by providing students multimedia interface features with the added ability to monitor the student's performance and to provide guidance towards the correct solution using methods of inquiry teaching. Current ITS suffer from expensive artificial intelligence (AI) inference engines, the inability for the expert to learn and handle radical strategy variability, and large empirical search spaces. Although a myriad of ITS exists, no one single topology provides a perfect solution. The main objective of this project was to provide an optimal solution to implementing an ITS component for the hypermedia IMTS, to coach in the domain of data structures. The pre-requisites for the topology chosen were low cost, high efficiency, platform independence, and the ability to be used on the World Wide Web (WWW). ADIS was successfully implemented and integrated with a graphical user interface (GUI) to interact with students The current framework contains the linked list, stack, and queue microworlds.