A Web-based game-oriented college selection system employing fuzzy rule trees

Our Web-based interactive game-playing-oriented college selection system acts as a smart advisor/mentor and helps students, parents, and teachers use an effective graphical user interface to efficiently search college information and to make good decisions at each stage of students\´ academic development. It is an expert agent with hierarchical fuzzy knowledge base using fuzzy logic. Users are expected to be able to use this agent as a trusted, involved and smart counselor, who remembers their profile and their past history and advises them through their high school years. It gives them increasingly better and specific nuggets of advice as they make progress through their schools, and guides them toward a selected set of colleges to apply that optimizes their potential. At the heart of this system is an assessment tree, which uses bottom-up fuzzy calculations to generate possibility of admission in various sets of colleges. The primary output is a short list of colleges to apply containing five kinds of colleges (highly-selective down to non-selective) with possibilities of acceptance in each college according to fuzzy rules provided. It is also a smart tool to play self-guided "what if games to explore what specific action one should be taking to have maximum impact on the selection of colleges one can get in and on his/her chances of admission. It employs a natural interactive interview process for a user (i.e., a user can play a game with the agent to gradually find out rational solutions), and produces advisories at different stages.