Hybrid ITS for DFA Construction Problems

Abstract

Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) that match or exceed human tutoring are often the product of expensive research efforts in specific domains, and the lack of high-quality ITS in other domains is partly explained by this high creation cost. In this paper, we propose a hybrid ITS, where human instructors perform two critical tasks within an otherwise automated system: (1) giving learners specific types of feedback, and (2) scaffolding students’ reasoning. We argue that such a hybrid ITS can be cost-effective when the pool of learners is too small to justify the cost of creating an ITS. To illustrate these arguments concretely, we have implemented a hybrid ITS for a component of the undergraduate Computer Science curriculum: the construction of DFA (deterministic finite automata).