ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the environment part of intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs). The term environment is used to refer to that part of the system specifying or supporting the activities that the student does and the methods available to the student to do those activities. That is, the environment defines the kinds of problems the student is to solve and the tools available for solving them. For example, in the SOPHIE I electronic troubleshooting environment (Brown & Burton, 1975, 1987; Brown, Burton, & deKleer, 1982), the activity is finding a fault in a broken piece of equipment, and the primary tool available to solve the problem is the ability to ask in English for the values of measurements made on the equipment. The environment part of SOPHIE supports these activities by providing a circuit simulation, a program to understand a subset of natural language, and the routines to set up contexts, keep history lists, and so forth. Our definition of environment includes some aspects of help that the system provides to the student while he or she is solving problems but does not include those forms of help that one would classify as requiring intelligence; these will be left to the chapter on tutoring, curriculum, and instruction (chapter 4). This chapter is of necessity brief and selective in its coverage of instructional environments. Wenger
(1987) provided a more detailed overview of many of the systems mentioned here, and more.
