EXPITS: An Experimental Environment on ITS

This paper presents a direct manipulation environment for learning intelligent tutoring systems. The environment provides views of internal states of a intelligent tutoring system and facilities for manipulating the states in order to study structures and functions of constituents of ITS. The target users of the learning environment are school teachers, students of AI courses and ITS researchers. School teachers get deep understanding about ITS by observing not only the external behaviors but also the inner states. AI students learn about design issues of ITS, roles of knowledge and characteristics of knowledge processing. ITS researcher can use the environment for a test bed of analyzing different methods of ITS constituents, because it provides facilities to replace its constituents.