Aidan's Design Study

Part of my honours project is to implement two interfaces for an Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS) for Thermodynamics (tentatively named Thermo-Tutor). The original interface basically aims to make input as efficient as possible, however in an ITS this shouldn't be the primary goal; ITSs are meant to teach something. The experimental interface takes some ideas from the field of cognitive science and sacrifices a certain amount of efficiency for improved learning (hopefully). From an OO design perspective the two interfaces are not drastically different, so I will only be looking at the standard interface. In my haste to get the interface working I invested very little effort in design. I'm sure that upon closer inspection I will find all sorts of stupid decisions.

Thermo-Tutor Interface

The interface of Thermo-Tutor is primarily a Java applet. The applet has three main components as shown in the following screen shot:

Requirements

• Intuitive Interface: In order to facilitate transferable learning it is important that the interface corresponds closely to how students would solve similar problems on paper.
• Maintain Working Solution: The applet must maintain a model of the student's working solution which can be easily manipulated and exported to XML to be sent to the server for checking.
• Maintainability and Extensibility: If Thermo-Tutor is to be extended to support more complex problems in the future, it is likely that the applet will need to be altered also.

Constraints

• None so far: What limits the design in any way? Any principles that I have chosen to break because it's unavoidable?

Initial Design

For my design study I will be looking at the design of the model in the applet, as opposed to the view. The following is a UML Class Diagram of the design which occurred very much by accident.

Brief description of the classes in this design:

• Element: Represents