An Intelligent Software Tutor for Scaffolding Solving DC-DC Converter Circuits

摘要

Power electronics is an enabling technology for the smart power grid. However, students often struggle in the Power Electronics course because it requires mastery and simultaneous application of concepts from several earlier courses. To address this educational challenge, based on this NSF-supported project, we have designed and developed a software tutor to help students in this course by providing a scaffold to translate visual information (circuit diagrams) to written information (equations) and analyze a power electronic converter circuit. The developed web-based software tool uses scaffolding as an interactive well-established pedagogical approach to improve students' learning and problem solving skills. Scaffolding provides students with a template and dynamic feedback to assist them in their early stages of learning. In our case, the developed software tutor assists students by scaffolding (i) creating circuit diagrams, (ii) translating circuit diagrams into equations, and (iii) solving the resulting equations. In each step, the tutor checks the accuracy of the student's work and provides constructive and formative feedback. Constructive feedback means that it takes note of student's mistakes and suggests ways to alleviate them. Formative feedback means that the tool advises students of their mistakes immediately after the mistake is made. The feedback messages provide the answer to three major questions: "where am I going?" (feed up), "how am I going?" (feed back), and "where to go next?" (feed forward). A feedback message describes (i) the issue, (ii) the cause of the issue, and (iii) the suggested solution.