ABSTRACT
The Grace Tutor, an intelligent tutoring system (ITS) for teaching COBOL, is part of the ACT* [1, 2] family of tutors. The Grace Tutor and the student interact in a mixed-initiative dialogue. The tutor's side of the dialogue is controlled by four components: a cognitive model (or simulation) of the ideal student, an “overlay” model of what the student does and does not know (knowledge tracing), a curriculum specification, and an interface component. For the Grace Tutor the ACT* tutor technology was transferred from the university research laboratory to an independent, corporate development laboratory. In this chapter we discuss our first year of work on the Grace Tutor as a case study in how an ITS architecture, developed at a university as a research project, was transferred, adapted, and used by a corporation. A second theme that we interweave with the first is that of ITS as CHI—or ITS as a good domain in which to study and explore issues in computer-human interaction.
