Abstract:

Educating future citizens of the world in physics is vitally important to ensure a bright future and for the advancement of society globally. Due to shortage of teachers and absence of adequate human tutors, many students are unable to understand concepts in physics and physical sciences. This leads to attrition and drop-outs of a large number of students in high school and college classrooms throughout the world. To address this urgent need, we demonstrate the effectiveness of teacher-authored intelligent tutors in physics. These tutors were designed with Carnegie Mellon University's state of the art Cognitive Tutor Authoring Tools (CTAT). These authoring tools enable teachers who are not experts in computer programming design, develop, and deploy intelligent tutors, and study their effectiveness in improving student knowledge. In this talk, we discuss the possibility of developing tutors for a wide array of physics and other science and engineering topics, and cite particular instances where we have demonstrated the remarkable efficacy of these tutors.

Keywords:

Physics education, engineering education, intelligent tutoring systems, artificial intelligence in education, mathematics education.