Electronics Made Simple

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This project applies artificial intelligence techniques to implement the concept of intelligent attendants or guides whose behavior (even personality) can be made to depend upon the attributes of the learner. The project accomplishes this by developing a SIMPLE (a set of many rooms) to accompany the first electronics course for students of electrical engineering. The SIMPLE emphasizes providing quick and ample feedback to students about their performance on the analytical and problem-solving aspects of electronics, including both simple exercises and open-ended design problems. The learner gets immediate feedback, as well as the benefits of learning independent self-assessment of work, on complex open-ended problems without direct participation by the instructor. The goal is to immerse learners in an intensely interactive computer simulated environment related to the subject matter they wish to learn. In the simulation, the learner sees a collection of connected "rooms" that may contain, at the pleasure of the instructor, informative notes and explanations (with graphics), project assignments, and tools (word processor, spreadsheet, text editor, and specialty software such as MathCAD and PSpice). By touring the complex of rooms, the learner acquires knowledge, accomplishes tasks, and demonstrates competence by interacting with the simulated environment. A key part of the effort is to publicize the SIMPLE and to provide relatively polished versions of several archetypical rooms (on floppy disks and over INTERNET) for the Plus/HyperCard environment to other faculty so that they can develop additional material for this and other courses.