New AI enables teachers to rapidly develop intelligent tutoring systems

Using a new method that employs artificial intelligence, a teacher can teach the computer by demonstrating several ways to solve problems in a topic, such as multicolumn addition, and correcting the computer if it responds incorrectly. Notably, the computer system learns to not only solve the problems in the ways it was taught, but also to generalize to solve all other problems in the topic, and do so in ways that might differ from those of the teacher, said Daniel Weitekamp III, a Ph.D. student in CMU's Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII). "A student might learn one way to do a problem and that would be sufficient," Weitekamp explained. "But a tutoring system needs to learn every kind of way to solve a problem." It needs to learn how to teach problem solving, not just how to solve problems.