Dr. Thevenin : an intelligent tutoring system for electrical circuits

Science and Engineering course contain one or two topics that are bottlenecks" in that they are brief, very difficult and important. Students often fail to master these topics and encounter difficulty in future performance and learning. Thevenin Equivalents in electrical circuits is one such topic. In this paper, we have presented an architecture of a tutoring system based on artificial intelligence techniques of pattern matching and, divide and conquer for teaching Thevenin equivalents. The architecture consists of several modules that communicate through a common data base or blackboard.The modules are problem solver, problem generator, instructor, scheduler-input recognizer, and Thevenin expert. The system is implemented in OPS5, Lisp and C. The system uses the Andrew window manager system for providing graphical capabilities to represent and manipulate the circuit. The paper also presents an illustration of interaction between the student and the current implementation of the system."