The Adaptive Feedback Agent (AFA)

The basic building block of higher learning in most STEM and professional schools is a technical problem — requiring the learner to produce a problem solving method (or, algorithm) — a sequence of operations that takes the evaluator from the problem statement to the solution in small and self-evident steps.

An adaptive feedback agent (AFA) takes each step in the problem solving process (from turning a ‘word problem’ into numbers and symbols and performing operations on these to get to the solution) and gives instantaneous feedback to the learner at each step, using intuitive prompts (‘forgot to invert the matrix’, ‘this is a European call option, use formula….’) that also contain prompts to targeted tutorials (‘differentiating polynomials’, ‘inverting matrices’). A script rolling in the background films the entire sequence of operations and tutorials, so that this learning session remains available in MP3 form, for the learner to look back on.