Kermit

KERMIT: a Knowledge-based Entity-Relationship Modelling Intelligent Tutoring System

Contents of this page:

• the overview of KERMIT
• the ITS 2002 presentations on KERMIT
• the Web-enabled version (EER-Tutor)
• recent publications

Overview of KERMIT

KERMIT is a Knowledge-based Entity Relationship Modelling Intelligent Tutor designed for the University students learning conceptual database modelling. KERMIT teaches the basic ER model. The system presents the requirements for a database the student is to design an ER diagram for. The interface of the system is illustrated here.

KERMIT is based on Constraint-Based Modeling (CBM), a student modeling approach proposed by Stellan Ohlsson. It is a very efficient approach which concentrates on the violations of the basic principles in the domain of instruction. Currently there are about 100 constraints in the system. The system's architecture is illustrated in the following figure.

In order to adapt to individual students, KERMIT maintains a model for each student. A student model contains information about the history of previous sessions (like a list of problems solved correctly etc) and also contains a model of the student's knowledge, expressed in terms of constraints.

KERMIT was evaluated at the Victoria University (Wellington) and the University of Canterbury. We thank Prof. Pavle Mogin for assisting with the Victoria evaluation. For the results of these evaluations, see the published papers.

KERMIT was developed by Pramuditha Suraweera, as his MSc project.

The ITS 2002 presentation on KERMIT

Since then, other members of ICTG have worked on extensions of KERMIT:

• Danita Hartley has developed eKERMIT, and extension of KERMIT with an open student model. See the published papers for details of the evaluation. The ITS 2002 presentation on eKERMIT is available here.
• Amali Weerasinghe has enhanced KERMIT to support self-explanation. Weerasinghe, A., Mitrovic, A. Effects of self-explanation in an open-ended domain. In: U. Hoppe, F. Verdejo & J. Kay (ed) Proc. 11th Int. Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education AIED 2003, IOS Press, pp. 512-514, 2003. (pdf)

The Web-enabled version (EER-Tutor)

EER-Tutor is the Web-enabled version of KERMIT. IT was developed in WETAS, and supports the Enhanced Entity-Relationship model. EER-Tutor is available on the DatabasePlace Web portal, and also locally.