ViPS: An Intelligent Tutoring System for Exploring and Learning Physics through Simple Machines

摘要

Students tend to retain naive understandings of concepts such as energy and force even after completing physics lessons in science classes. We developed a learning environment called the Virtual Physics System (ViPS) to help students master these concepts in the context of pulleys, a class of simple machines that are difficult to construct and experiment with in the real world. Several features make ViPS unique: it combines simulation and tutoring, it customizes tutoring to address common misconceptions and it employs a pedagogical strategy that identifies student misconceptions and guides students in solving problems through virtual experimentation. This paper describes the ViPS system and studies in which we evaluated its efficacy. Our results indicate that ViPS is effective in helping students learn and overcome their misconceptions.