This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5)
This engineering education research award to Carnegie-Mellon University in collaboration with Drexel University will employ researchers to develop and deploy novel interactive chat-based tutorials to enhance learning in several core mechanical engineering courses. The tutorials will support self paced instruction in which students and dialog agents can engage in tutorial conversation. This capability will allow real-time interventions which can help students develop intuition and will also support technical communications needed for collaboration with geographically distributed teams. This research could provide a fundamentally new resource for engineering education and will yield insight into adaptive tutorial strategies that can most effectively support self-paced learning. It has the potential to greatly advance capabilities for interactive learning, distributed learning, and distributed technical collaboration which are all needed to better educate engineers for jobs in the global workplace.
