CHARLES RIVER ANALYTICS, INC. — Department of Defense SBIR Phase I: Intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs) provide a powerful new mechanism to improve education

Description

Intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs) provide a powerful new mechanism to improve education by providing one-on-one tutoring interactions without the need for a human tutor. Unfortunately, many domains of learning, especially those that focus on physical skills, require the creation of complex simulations that incur significant development overhead. While modern computer-based game engines are able to simulate these concrete, dynamic domains to great degrees of interactivity and fidelity, they lack formal feedback and training mechanisms. Therefore, to enable high-quality pedagogical feedback with interactive high-fidelity simulation, cost-effective methods are needed to integrate existing and new ITS solutions with modern computer-based game engines. We propose to design and demonstrate the feasibility of a Game Environment Interlingua to Support Tutoring (GEIST), a generalized architecture to integrate ITS solutions with modern computer-based games. GEIST: (1) reduces ITS-game environment integration effort using a ITS-game interlingua; (2) intelligently configures the game environment to present ITS problems; (3) monitors, interprets, and reports student actions to the ITS during training; and (4) communicates feedback from the ITS to the trainee through the game environment. The GEIST design is based on our team"s existing work in ITSs, planning, knowledge representation, and game environment integration.