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.

Requirements

The interface of Thermo-Tutor is primarily a Java applet. The requirements of this applet are:

• Provide an 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 the student's 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.

Initial Design

For my design study I will be looking at the design of the model in the applet, as opposed to the view.