A computer-based tutor for learning energy and power

Abstract

Educating our future citizens in science and engineering is vitally important to ensure future advancement. Presently, in the light of environmental sustainability, it is critical that students learn concepts relating to energy, its consumption and future demands. In this article, we harness the state of the educational technology, namely Intelligent Tutoring System to teach concepts relating to energy and power. We describe the design and implementation of our computer-based tutor to bridge this knowledge and skills gap. We built a responsive tutoring system with Carnegie Mellon University’s Cognitive Tutor Authoring Tools that challenges the students with quantitative problems based on energy, provides immediate feedback to student answers and provides need-based, timely help that supports student learning. We explain our research-based design that provides a friendly and welcoming user interface, displays astute and anticipatory software behaviour, and scaffolds student learning through appropriate clues and hints.