Intelligent multimedia tutoring systems

Flashy graphics and simulations have shown to be insufficient in order to keep students learning and active. For students to learn, the experience has to be authentic and relevant to their lives. Therefore students must be placed in situations where they solve problems while the system reasons about the problem being solved and about how to best respond to the students idiosyncratic actions. One such situation is a simulated hospital emergency room used for the Cardiac Tutor, and another is a computer-aided design environment that proposes injection molding tooling configurations for a student's part design. Intelligent multimedia tutors such as these may use planner, plan recognizers, or user models to make assumptions about the situation and the user's state of knowledge and learning needs. Complex representations and sophisticated control structures are also used to respond flexibly to the user.