The FLOW Tutor

Book excerpt: A human tutor brings a wide range of knowledge to the task of instructing a student. The tutor must develop a model of the student and of the topic matter; he must have a plan of instruction, but be able to deviate from it when student behavior calls for changes. This paper discusses observations made of human tutors and describes the FLOW tutor system -- a computer-based simulation of a human tutor capable of giving advice to a student learning the simple 'FLOW' computer language. The tutor has a schema-based knowledge structure containing information about the programming language, the student's instruction booklet, and the student's developing knowledge. These schemas form the basis of a distributed intelligence system which uses conceptually guided and data-driven processing to interpret the student's behavior, update the model of the student, and give advice to the student.