A Multi-Agent Internet Based Tutoring System (I-ATCL) for Teaching Computer Programming Languages

This paper presents an agent-based tutoring system (I-ATCL) in presence of agent and internet technology. The I-ATCL system consists of two agents; a personal assistant agent for teachers (PAA-T) and a personal assistant agent for students (PAA-S). The PAA-S resides on the client side and communicates via HTTP and IIOP with the PAA-T on the server side. This structure allows customization of the PAA-S to the needs of the student without putting extra burden on the server. Also this allows having many teacher agents attending to the needs of a single or multiple student agents. The PAA-T allows the teachers to cope with the knowledge base of a computer language under investigation, add or modify the commands' structure that will be taught. Also, this agent can generate a new tutoring dialog for a new computer programming language by consulting previous tutoring dialogs for another computer programming language. PAA-S contains student model and tutoring module. In student model, the system can accept free-format answer from the student, and checks it against the language structure.