Students solve small problems and are tutored by Socratic dialog with the computer.
Our current point of view is that tutoring can best be modeled as a form of discourse, so a tutor must incorporate a collection of verbal gambits with which to convince the student and a set of rules for planning a cohesive conversation. This project is in collaboration with the Department of Physiology of Rush Medical College. We are currently working on version 3 of the program. In previous years, the difficulty of gathering data from which to derive information stemmed from the inability of the user to find and access appropriate data sources. Today, we have too much data available on-line.