FITS: A Fraction Intelligent Tutoring System

Abstract

This paper presents FITS - an Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS) for the domain of addition of fractions. It was developed with the aim of improving on many of the shortcomings of existing tutors in the mathematical domain. The paper largely describes its functioning. In order to give the reader a better 'feel' of the tutor's capabilities than obtained from its description, an actual student-tutor protocol extract is given. More significantly the tutor has also been evaluated in several ways with seemingly very encouraging results so far; however, due to length restrictions they are not reported in this paper. The paper concludes by briefly highlighting some of FITS's improved features over other existing tutors in the domain as well as some of its shortcomings.