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Cognitive Tutors have been successful in raising students' math test scores in high school and middle-school classrooms, but their development has traditionally required considerable time and expertise. With the Cognitive Tutor Authoring Tools (CTAT), creating Cognitive Tutors is both easier for experts and possible for novices in cognitive science. The tools draw on ideas of programming by demonstration, structured editing, and others.

Project News

CTAT 2.7.1 Released October 19, 2009

CTAT version 2.7.1 is available for download. This release fixes a critical bug in Flash client-side logging, and introduces more improvements to tab order and focus management for Flash components.

Read more in the release notes, or download CTAT.

CTAT 2.7 Released September 22, 2009

CTAT version 2.7 is available for download. This release includes many new features and bug fixes for the authoring tools and Flash components. Some highlights:

  • Behavior graph editing improvements: insert a step anywhere in a graph; (re-)demonstrate the contents of an existing step.
  • Beta version of the Link Inspector: click a step in a behavior graph and its contents are displayed in a single panel.
  • New Flash components, CommNumberBar and CommImage.
  • Support for specifying tab order in Flash tutors.

Read more in the release notes, or download CTAT.

Martina Rau wins Best Student Paper Award at 2009 AIED conference August 18, 2009

First-year HCII graduate student and CTAT user Martina Rau won the Best Student Paper Award at the 14th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education, AIED 2009, which was held in Brighton, UK, July 6-10. Her paper, entitled "Intelligent tutoring systems with multiple representations and self-explanation prompts support learning of fractions", was co-authored with Vincent Aleven and Nikol Rummel, and features CTAT example-tracing tutors with Flash interfaces that the author created for each condition of the experiment:

We investigated the value of MGRs [multiple graphical representations] for fractions learning in the context of a proven intelligent tutoring system (ITS) technology, namely, Cognitive Tutors [19-21]. Specifically, we developed a set of example-tracing tutors for fractions learning, a type of tutors that are behaviorally similar to Cognitive Tutors, but that rely on examples of correct and incorrect solution paths rather than on a cognitive model underlying student behavior. We created these tutors with the Cognitive Tutor Authoring Tools (CTAT [22]).

Read the paper (PDF)

CTAT 2.6.1 Released July 10, 2009

CTAT version 2.6.1 is available for download. CTAT 2.6.1 is primarily a bug-fix release. CTAT will now vary step-out-of-order feedback messages based on whether or not the tutor is configured to highlight the correct step. Also included in the release is a new tutor template for NetBeans version 6.7 (the current NetBeans release).

Read more in the release notes, or download CTAT.

CTAT 2.6 Released June 3, 2009

CTAT version 2.6 is available for download. CTAT 2.6 includes many new features and bug fixes for the authoring tools and both Flash and Java widgets. Some highlights:

  • Logging error-checking for Java tutors
  • Changes to formula grammar, which affects how the formulas in expression-matching steps are parsed and interpreted
  • New CTAT formulas for expression matching
  • An updated Jess Eclipse plugin
  • Tutor-performed actions for Jess cognitive tutors
  • A student-starts-here feature for making any state a starting state and creating worked examples
  • A Flash feature called "the scrim", a partially transparent screen which appears when the tutor is not yet ready for a student to start working on a problem or when the tutor disconnects from the Tutoring Service. Whenever the scrim is visible, all tutor components are disabled.
  • A new Flash component, CommImage
  • Updated Flash example tutors, including a new one for tutoring conversion factors

... and much more!

Read more in the release notes, or download CTAT 2.6.

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