Authoring Simulation-Centered Tutors with RIDES

RIDES is an application for authoring and delivering interactive graphical simulations and tutorials in the context of those simulations. Some types of instruction can be generated automatically by exploiting structured simulation data. RIDES technology plays an important part in a number of related research and development projects. RIDES introduces innovations in the human-computer interface (HCI) of simulation-centered tutorial authoring systems, including support for constraint and event authoring, enforcing the primacy of reference, and permitting the authoring of procedure tutorials by interactive demonstration. RIDES simulations provide low level automatic support for detecting student operations and observations and are well-suited for teaching procedures. Authoring use has revealed a number of additional design considerations that should be taken into account in the development of future tutor authoring systems. Foremost among these is the need for an open architecture that supports collaboration among tutor components, including collaboration with types of tutor components that have not yet been developed.