INTELLITUTOR: a knowledge based intelligent programming environment for novice programmers

INTELLITUTOR works as a human programming tutor to guide a user who is trying to write programs, detects logical errors included within the user´s program, and gives advice not only for fixing them but also for letting him notice his misunderstandings. These intelligent functions are achieved by the knowledge-based program comprehension ability of the system. The key knowledge used to understand user´s programs is represented in a form of hierarchical graph called hierarchical procedure graph (HPG), an abstract representation of knowledge about an algorithm. The key concept in designing the INTELLITUTOR system is a cognitive psychology-based design. Although the experimental system is handling Pascal programs most knowledge included is applicable to other programming languages. The system is implemented by the knowledge engineering environment ZERO on a Lisp machine.<>