A Tutorial System (ATS) for Personal Computers

Abstract

ATS (A Tutorial System) was written originally in APL/360 for use on large timesharing systems. This paper describes a version of ATS written in BASIC for the TRS/80 Color Computer. Although both the representation of tutorial data, and the programming methods by which the results are achieved, are very different, the two versions of ATS appear almost identical to the users (authors and students). ATS contains an author interrogation program that interviews the author in English and formats his tutorial for him, and a tutorial supervisor program that interfaces with the students. The supervisor program contains many features of machine intelligence (a knowledge of the rules of human discourse) which operate in every tutorial without intervention by the author, and provide the discourse with an aura of intelligent behavior. Certain aspects of both these programs are illustrated by terminal examples, and the general methods of implementation in BASIC are discussed.