Betty's Brain is a software environment created at

Vanderbilt University Vanderbilt University (informally Vandy or VU) is a private research university in Nashville, Tennessee. Founded in 1873, it was named in honor of shipping and rail magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt, who provided the school its initial $1-million ...

by the ''Teachable Agents Group'' to help promote students' understanding of metacognitive skills and to reinforce river ecosystem knowledge as part of a science curriculum. It is a qualitative constraint system, using node-link diagrams to represent models for teaching complex scientific and engineering domains in high school.Leelawong & Biswas, 2008 Designing learning by teaching agents: The Betty's Brain system. International Journal of Artificial Intelligence and Education, 18(3),181-208. The system specifically focuses on reinforcing so called self-regulatory skills that promote both self monitoring and

self assessment In social psychology, self-assessment is the process of looking at oneself in order to assess aspects that are important to one's identity. It is one of the motives that drive self-evaluation, along with self-verification and self-enhancement. Se ...

as one might expect of an independent learner. The system focuses around a main character, Betty, who has asked the students to teach her about river ecosystems. In this way Betty's Brain diverges from a classic

intelligent tutoring system An intelligent tutoring system (ITS) is a computer system that aims to provide immediate and customized instruction or feedback to learners, usually without requiring intervention from a human teacher. ITSs have the common goal of enabling learni ...

(ITS) and adopts the

learning by teaching In the field of pedagogy, learning by teaching (German: ''Lernen durch Lehren'', short LdL) is a method of teaching in which students are made to learn material and prepare lessons to teach it to the other students. There is a strong emphasis on ac ...

(LBT) paradigm where computer agent interactions are focused around completing a primary task unrelated to the acquisition of domain content knowledge. More recently, Betty's level of

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech re ...

has been largely modified to increase the interactivity with the students. Betty's task is to interact with students as a "good" learner, one who has self-regulatory skills, might. By incorporating feedback related to these self-regulatory skills we have shown that students are better able to perform in future learning tasks. Current studies are focused on the 5th grade classroom with approximately 100 students. As well, as of July 2007, the system is being developed to integrate directly into classroom curriculum for the coming semester with included tools such as Front of the Class Betty, developed at

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...

. As of 2013 it has been used in many experiments to test the effectiveness of building and examining dynamic models for instruction in scientific domains. In several studies of Betty’s Brain by Biswas and collaborators, they trained students by having them create models of the

oxygen cycle Oxygen cycle refers to the movement of oxygen through the atmosphere (air), biosphere (plants and animals) and the lithosphere (the Earth’s crust). The oxygen cycle demonstrates how free oxygen is made available in each of these regions, as wel ...

in a water-based ecosystem and then assessed them by having them create models of the nitrogen cycle in a land-based ecosystem. This is called a transfer test and it is a standard technique in learning experiments. In both activities, the systems were presented with resources and the

modeling language A modeling language is any artificial language that can be used to express information or knowledge or systems in a structure that is defined by a consistent set of rules. The rules are used for interpretation of the meaning of components in the st ...

was the qualitative diagram language built into the system. Experimental controls tested various

hypotheses A hypothesis (plural hypotheses) is a proposed explanation for a phenomenon. For a hypothesis to be a scientific hypothesis, the scientific method requires that one can test it. Scientists generally base scientific hypotheses on previous obser ...

to begin to determine what worked and what did not. This is a powerful environment for beginning to understand what is effective about building

simulations A simulation is the imitation of the operation of a real-world process or system over time. Simulations require the use of models; the model represents the key characteristics or behaviors of the selected system or process, whereas the s ...

. Other useful systems for studying the effects of modelling for learning are IQON and

Colab Colab is the commonly used abbreviation of the New York City artists' group Collaborative Projects, which was formed after a series of open meetings between artists of various disciplines. History Colab members came together as a collective in ...

References

{{reflist Basu, Satabdi, Kinnebrew, John S., Dickes, Amanda, Farris, Amy Voss, Sengupta, Pratim, Winger, Jaymes, & Biswas, Gautam. (2012). A science learning environment using a computational thinking approach. Paper presented at the Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Computers in Education, Singapore. Beek, Wouter, Bredeweg, B., & Lautour, Sander. (2011). Context-dependent help for the DynaLearn modelling and simulation workbench In G. Biswas (Ed.), Artificial Intelligence in Education (pp. 4200–4422). Berlin: Springer-Verlag. Biswas, Gautam, Jeong, H., Kinnebrew, John S., Sulcer, Brian, & Roscoe, Rod D. (in press, 2012). Measuring self-regulated learning skills through social interactions in a teachable agent environment. Research and Practice in Technology Enhanced Learning. Biswas, Gautam, Leelawong, Krittaya, Schwartz, Daniel L., & Vye, N. J. (2005). Learning by teaching:

external URLs

https://web.archive.org/web/20110706031533/http://www.vanderbilt.edu/magazines/vanderbilt-magazine/2008/03/bettys_brain_motivates_learning/ Science education software