Building a dialogue in TuTalk to teach Pythagorean Theorem by Damian & I-Pei

1. Building a dialogue in TuTalk to teach Pythagorean Theoremby Damian & I-Pei • Goals: • Build a dialogue to support the learning of Pythagorean Theorem • Make dialogue interactive and simple • Build on simple and related concepts which will lead students to a better understanding of Pythagorean Theorem • Context of design: • Domain: Mathematics • Target Group: Grade 7/8 students

2. Building a dialogue in TuTalk to teach Pythagorean Theorem Damian Clarke & I-Pei Tung Track: TuTalk Mentor: Carolyn P. Rose PSLC Summer School 2007

3. Build a dialogue to support the learning of Pythagorean Theorem Make dialogue interactive and simple Build on simple and related concepts which will lead students to a better understanding of Pythagorean Theorem Goals

4. What is TuTalk? • Dialogue authoring tool for non-technical users • Allow learning researchers to study dialogue • Allow educational technology researchers to quickly build dialogue based help systems for their tutoring systems

5. Authoring Dialogue Framework • Author designs dialogue • Author edit dialogue in the development component of tool • Author defines steps and boundaries in the development component of tool • Author test dialogue in the development component of tool • Dialogue is deploy to end user via end user component of tool

6. Context for Pythagorean Theorem Dialogue • Domain: Mathematics • Learning Topic: Pythagorean Theorem • Target Group: Grade 7/8 students

7. Designing the dialogue for the learning environment experiment • Dialogue tested background knowledge • Properties of a triangle: sides, angles, sum of the angles, types • Dialogue introduced concepts of right triangle • One 90° internal angle(a right angle) • The side opposite to the right angle is the hypotenuse, as the longest side in the right triangle

8. Designing the dialogue for the learning environment experiment • Introduce the theorem • Well-formed word problem • Cognitive walkthrough processes

9. Authoring Dialogues

10. Testing Dialogues

11. Preview Dialogues

12. Producing Dialogues

13. Designing Dialogue • Difficult to introduce this topic solely from conceptual and real life analogies • Did a survey to acquire various learning experiences from other workshop participants • Decided on a procedural approach of stepping through an example

14. Using TuTalk • Learning curve to configure system to build dialogue was reasonable • Authoring dialogues are relatively simple • Too many steps adding and updating concepts (e.g. concept manager)

15. Using TuTalk • Suggestions: • Integrate the preview tab and the author tab, by making preview tab main development area • No more “right clicks” • Pop or drop down menu to add or update concepts • Editing area for concept manager bigger • Color code end user and tutor dialogue • Accommodate longer-answer responses

16. Future Implementations • Integrating graphical representation with dialogues via importing from other software • Providing with the feature of longer answers (e.g. explanations and justifications) can be a valid way to understand learners’ conceptual knowledge • Archiving system usage with specific group of users to analyze the process of initiatives, responses, and feedback to create a user model • Inviting international users to implement it and further provide the system developers with feedback and constraints they encounter