An Intelligent Tutoring System for Teaching The Stroke Orders of Chinese Characters on The Internet

Abstract

This paper presents an Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS) for teaching the stroke orders of Chinese characters through the Internet. Since each Chinese character is like a picture, the correct stroke orders can get a more easily and comfortable writing behavior.. So, it is important the correct stroke orders for writing the Chinese characters. Based on these reasons, the correct stroke orders of Chinese characters are taught in primary schools at Taiwan. In the proposed system, students can use the mouse to write (I,e., drag the mouse) a Chinese character on the browser (e.g., Microsoft Internet Explore). The writing behavior of each student will be learned by the neuron-based student model. When a wrong stroke order is written, a short animated cartoon movie will be shown to warn the student, and the reason of errors will be explained. An intelligent tutoring module in this system will select a Chinese character, which is similar to the wrong stroke order’s character, to teach the student again. Many databases and rule-bases are used to store the important information, such as the correct stoke orders and the structure of each Chinese character, the writing behavior of each student, the inference rules for selecting the training character, and the error codes (types), etc. Students can enjoy in this ITS to learn the correct stroke orders of Chinese characters on the Internet. This system had been developed since 1996, and been operated by more than one thousand people. Experimental results show that there are more than 82% primary students who can’t write the correct stroke orders of Chinese characters. The proposed system is verified that has a high value to teach students of learning the correct stroke orders of Chinese characters. In addition the neuron-based student model and the intelligent tutoring model successfully extent the applications of artificial intelligence (AI).