ATIA: algorithm teaching interface agent

This work presents an intelligent algorithm teaching interface agent (ATIA) that teaches algorithms. This agent is autonomous, goal-driven, dynamic and collaborative, and acts as a mediator between the student and the tutoring environment. It monitors the student´s habits and weaknesses to adapt its didactic directions based on his/her interests and preferences. This approach facilitates the reusability of this agent in different tutoring domains, such as iterative and recursive algorithms. ATIA offers to students a common, flexible and customizable interface that they can use for different algorithms. It explains an algorithm at various levels of abstraction. Each level is designed to present a single operation used in the algorithm. Operations are shown in a textual form of a pseudocode with an associated visualization. ATIA can make changes to the schedule of the algorithm lessons based on the student´s performance. To demonstrate and evaluate the feasibility of the proposed agent, we describe a prototype, which is being developed.