Intelligent tutoring system for sudoku on mobile platform

Abstract

Sudoku as a world-wide popular game has the potential to develop the player's logical thinking ability. However, there are few researches or applications that address this use. As mobile devices have become widely available in students, an Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS) on mobile platform yields great promise. In this project, I reviewed important theories and methodologies related to logical thinking and ITS and proposed an ITS for Sudoku on Android platform. The primary feature of the proposed system is to provide adaptive instructions during a Sudoku game based on each individual player's expertise in Sudoku, learning preference and gaming performance. The proposed system consists of three major components: a Sudoku ITS rested on Android platform, an external database that keeps the records of all registered players of the Sudoku ITS for future analysis and a web server to connect between these two components. Among the three components, the Sudoku ITS is the key part which directly interacts with the user and bears all tutoring functionalities. The Sudoku ITS adopts the classical ITS architecture which is composed of an expert model, a student model, a tutor model and a user interface. The expert model is constructed based on the ACT-R cognitive theory and employs a rule-based knowledge representation. The student model stores information related to the student's background, gaming performance and learning progress on Sudoku and uses an overlay model to keep track of the student's mastery on each Sudoku strategy. The tutor model adopts a mix-initiative interaction mechanism and provides instructions by using conversational dialogs. In addition, it employs an instruction decision mechanism based on the ACT-R cognitive theory to adapt its instructions to each student. The proposed Sudoku ITS can be used by individual players who want to learn Sudoku, to enhance Sudoku skills or just to play for fun as well as by human tutors for educational purposes.