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The design of the SCENT automated advisor
Author(s) -
McCalla Gordon I.,
Bunt Richard B.,
Harms Janelle J.
Publication year - 1986
Publication title -
computational intelligence
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.353
H-Index - 52
eISSN - 1467-8640
pISSN - 0824-7935
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-8640.1986.tb00073.x
Subject(s) - debugging , computer science , blackboard (design pattern) , task (project management) , process (computing) , variety (cybernetics) , human–computer interaction , lisp , control flow , software engineering , programming language , artificial intelligence , engineering , systems engineering
The SCENT (Student Computing ENvironmenT) project is concerned with building an intelligent tutoring system to help student programmers debug their LISP programs. The major thrust of current SCENT investigations is into the design of the SCENT advisor which is meant to provide debugging assistance to novice students. Six conceptual levels constitute the advisor. At the lowest level is the “raw data,” consisting of the student's (possibly buggy) program. This can be interpreted by a “program behaviour” level which can produce traces, cross‐reference charts, etc. from the student's program. These traces, etc. can be analyzed by “observers” for interesting patterns. At the next level are “strategy judges” and “diagnosticians” which determine which strategy the student has used in his/her program and bugs in this strategy. A “task expert” provides task‐specific input into the process of analyzing the student's solution, and a “student‐knowledge component” provides student‐specific input into this process. Information from the six levels interacts in a variety of ways and control is similarly hierarchical. This necessitates a blackboard‐style scheme to coordinate information dissemination and control flow. This paper discusses the objectives of SCENT and focusses on organizing the process of debugging student programs. A complete example is given to illustrate how entities at the six levels interact and to indicate the kinds of information sharing that occur in the SCENT advisor. The paper concludes with an evaluation of the strengths and weaknesses of this approach to automated debugging, and suggestions about directions for further exploration.