AN INDEXING FRAMEWORK FOR ADAPTIVE ARRANGEMENT OF MECHANICS PROBLEMS FOR ITS

This paper describes an indexing framework for adaptive arrangement of mechanics problems in ITS (Intelligent Tutoring System). There have b een some studies for adaptive arrangement of problems in ITS. However, they only choose a solution method in order to characterize a problem used in the practice. Because their target domains have been sufficie ntly formalized, this kind of characterization has sufficed to describ e the relations between any two problems of such a class. In other wor ds, here, it is enough to make students understand only the solution m ethods for the given class of problems. However, in other domains, it is also important to understand concepts used in the problems and not only to understand solution methods. In mechanics problems, concepts s uch as mechanical objects, their attributes, and phenomena composed of the objects and the attributes also need to be taught. Therefore, the difference between solution methods applied is not sufficient to desc ribe the difference between two given problems. To use this type of pr oblems properly in the practice, it is necessary to propose an advance d new characterization framework. In this paper, we describe a mechani cs problem with three components: (1) surface structure, (2) phenomeno n structure, (3) solution structure. Surface structure describes surfa ce features of a problem with mechanical objects, their configuration, and each object's attributes given or required in the problem. Phenom enon structure is described by attributes and operational relations am ong them included in the phenomenon specific to the surface structure. Solution structure is described by a sequence of operational relation s which compute required attributes from given attributes. We call thi s characterizing indexing because we use it as index of each problem. This paper also describes an application of the indexing to arrangemen t of problems. We propose two mechanisms of control: (a) reordering of a problem sequence, and (b) simplifying of a problem. By now, we have implemented basic functions to realize the mechanisms except for the part of interface.