DiscMath: An intelligent tutoring system for discrete mathematics.

摘要

Tutoring is an effective type of personalized teaching. A computer software which tries to imitate this expertise intelligently is named an Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS). Although there have been many ITSs developed so far, one notices four short-comings: (1) successful ITSs in many domains, such as Discrete Mathematics, are rare; (2) application of multimedia in ITSs is still limited; (3) ITSs do not fully exploit Object-Oriented technology, for instance one still needs to make considerable changes to an existing ITS to make it suitable for another knowledge domain; and, (4) most existing ITSs are not platform independent.;This thesis addresses the above four issues with regard to Discrete Mathematics as the knowledge domain. This subject remains a major obstacle for students specializing in computer science. This thesis is concerned with the design and partial implementation of a World Wide Web (WWW) based multimedia-oriented ITS for Discrete Mathematics.;We describe the overall structure of the system and its main components. A thorough analysis of the system with regard to the above-mentioned shortcomings and also main features of the components of the system are presented. The knowledge and student performance modelings are crucial issues in any ITS. They specify how knowledge is represented and accessed in the system, as well as how a student's activities are viewed and modeled by the system. In our ITS there are two closely related components, Knowledge Model and Student Model, for dealing with these issues. We describe the detailed design and implementation of these components. For reasons accessibility by a standard WWW browser, the implementation is done fully in the Java programming language. In order to demonstrate the functionality of the implemented components, we have developed a simple GUI for the system. This interface works as a prototype for system GUI and is described in this thesis.