2016 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

AN INTELLIGENT TUTORING SYSTEM FOR MULTIMEDIA VIRTUAL POWER LABORATORY

Ning Gong, Saroj Biswas, Li Bai, Brian Butz
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Temple University, Philadelphia, PA19122

Abstract

A laboratory practicum is considered a key element in traditional undergraduate education in power engineering, however is often ignored for various reasons, such as expenses for establishing a physical laboratory, safety of students working with high voltage source, and lack of qualified teaching assistants. With the current availability of web-based multimedia authoring tools and high speed Internet interfaces, web-based virtual power engineering laboratories are becoming a reality for providing students with a reasonable alternative to physical laboratory experience.

In this paper, we present continuation of an NSF funded project on the development of a Virtual Power Laboratory (VPL) environment that can simulate an electric machines laboratory. The VPL is a universal web-based platform that can be accessed anywhere by most mobile devices and standard computers. The architecture of the virtual laboratory consists of eight modules: 1) Core Concept Knowledge Base, 2) Experiment Knowledge Base, 3) Mathematical Tools, 4) a Virtual Instrumentation Core, 5) the Student Interaction Module, 6) Multimedia Graphical User Interface Module, 7) User Management Module, and 8) Intelligent Tutoring Module. Development of the first seven modules has been reported in previous years. This paper describes the final stage of the VPL architecture which is instructional design and implementation of an intelligent tutoring system.

The virtual laboratory is supervised by a virtual Intelligent Tutor that can track the students’ progress and monitor their actions in the virtual laboratory platform. The VPL offers a virtual experimental environment with 2D graphics, 3D animations, audio guidance, simulations, knowledge concept bases, and virtual experiments. The intelligent tutoring system is designed on top of these functionalities. It is designed to be able to process the resources existing in the virtual laboratory in order to track the students’ progress, monitor the students’ actions, answer questions from the students, and guide the student with prerequisite material on the subject matter.

With the addition of the intelligent tutoring system, this virtual laboratory serves as an intelligent learning platform to bring the best of both worlds in the learning environment: the richness of domain knowledge concepts and the tutoring supported by multimedia interactive simulation that mimics a physical laboratory environment.

Key Words: Virtual Power Laboratory, Intelligent Tutor, Electric machines, Web application.