The Assistment Builder: A Rapid Development Tool for ITS

Intelligent Tutoring Systems are notoriously costly to construct [1], and require PhD level experience in cognitive science and rule based programming. The goal of this research was to ease the development process for building pseudo-tutors [4], which are ITS constructs that mimic cognitive tutors but are limited in that they only work for a single problem. The Assistment Builder is a system designed to rapidly develop, test, and deploy simple pseudo-tutors. These tutors provide a simple cognitive model based upon a state graph tailored to a specific problem. These tutors offer many of the features of rule-based tutors, but without the expensive creation time. The system simplifies the process of tutor construction to allow users with little or no ITS experience to develop content. The system provides a web-based interface as a means to build and store these simple tutors we have called Assistments . This paper describes our attempt to make the process of developing content easy for teachers. We present some evidence to suggest that these novice users can develop a tutor for a problem in under thirty minutes.