Introduction

The imagination of machines replacing human teachers – maybe not as a whole but at least part-wise – has inspired philosophers educational and computer scientists for many decades. One of the first steps was Skinner’s and Pressey’s teaching machines – at that time purely mechanical instructional devices. Since then the desire accrued to create machines that are capable of empathizing with human beings. Turing’s universal machine receives input from outside and transfers it into a particular internal state. Moreover, the Turing machine can output information that it may read again as its input. This way, the Turing machine may feed itself with changes of its internal state. The INTUITEL research project – an acronym for “Intelligent Tutoring Interface for technology Enhanced Learning” aimed to develop a general design for such an adaptive system. In the first place, INTUITEL is a design pattern.