CIRCUIT TUTOR: PROTOTYPE OF A WEB-BASED MOBILE INTELLIGENT TUTOR IN CIRCUIT THEORY

Abstract

This thesis describes the design, implementation, and assessment of a web-based mobile tutoring application. The goal of this application, called Circuit Tutor, is to address the educational needs of students with the aid of intelligent tutoring systems that are available on mobile devices and are used outside of the traditional classroom environment. The growth of sophisticated intelligent tutoring applications and systems has helped gradually change the preconceived notion that intelligent tutoring systems cannot be relied upon in secondary education. More so, with the advent of mobile learning applications, learning can no longer be restricted to a specific location or time to acquire knowledge or a place and time to apply knowledge. While many intelligent tutoring systems (ITS) have been mostly developed as desktop applications, the equivalent of these applications have only lately begun to be implemented for mobile devices. The proposed design aims to employ the various spheres of mobile human-computer interaction and mobile learning in the structure and implementation of an ITS for contemporary mobile tablets (for example, the iPad®). Circuit Tutor will not substitute traditional instruction; however, it will provide undergraduate electrical engineering students with intelligent support when instructors are not available. This tutoring system will perform some actions traditionally done by a teacher or instructor - such as detecting errors, identifying concepts that the student is finding difficult to comprehend, as well as referring the student back to the appropriate learning material if the student does not show progress after a set of exercises. Most importantly, this thesis aims to serve as a foundation for future research that investigates the design of mobile intelligent tutoring systems as well as research in the techniques of effectively converting existing desktop tutoring applications to mobile applications.