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Beetle-Grow: An Effective
Intelligent Tutoring System for Data
Elaine Farrow
University of Edinburgh
School of Informatics
10 Crichton Street
Edinburgh, EH8 9AB, UK
Myroslava O. Dzikovska1
University of Edinburgh
School of Informatics
10 Crichton Street
Edinburgh, EH8 9AB, UK
Johanna D. Moore
University of Edinburgh
School of Informatics
10 Crichton Street
Edinburgh, EH8 9AB, UK
We present the Beetle-Grow intelligent tutoring
system, which combines active experimentation,
self-explanation, and formative feedback using natural
language interaction. It runs in a standard web browser
and has a fresh, engaging design. The underlying back-end
system has previously been shown to be highly effective in
teaching basic electricity and electronics concepts.
Beetle-Grow has been designed to capture student
interaction and indicators of learning in a form suitable for
data mining, and to support future work on building tools
for interactive tutoring that improve after experiencing
interaction with students, as human tutors do.
Author Keywords
intelligent tutoring; natural language; interaction data;
conceptual learning; physics; electronics
made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear
owner/author(s). Copyright is held by the owner/author(s).
L@S 2016, April 25–26, 2016, Edinburgh, Scotland, UK.
ACM 978-1-4503-3726-7/16/04.
Many effective teaching techniques combine active
experimentation, self-explanation, and formative
feedback [1, 2, 7, 8, 9, 10]. In classroom situations, these
rely heavily on dialogue with a teacher. Our work focuses
on implementing similar techniques in an Intelligent
Tutoring System (ITS) using natural language interaction.
1 Myroslava
Dzikovska is now at Google, London
In learning environments with a very high student-teacher
ratio such as MOOCs, it is clearly not practical for every
learner to engage in extended dialogue with an expert
human tutor. A dialogue-based ITS can promote learning
by guiding experimentation, eliciting predictions and
explanations, and generating tailored formative feedback
automatically for a large population of learners.
Figure 1: The graphics used in
the interactive circuit workbench
combine selective stylization with
an element of realism to facilitate
a constructivist learning
approach [3], encouraging
learners to experiment freely and
learn from hands-on experience.
Automated methods for analyzing student input often
use statistical models trained on large corpora of student
language [6]. We would like to go beyond identifying
correct and incorrect student answers in text and start to
use interaction data to learn effective feedback tactics.
This would allow a future ITS to improve from interaction
with students, just as human tutors do [11]. A necessary
first step is to collect the required training data.
The Beetle-Grow system we describe in this paper
is designed for large-scale data collection, while also
delivering a valuable learning experience in its own right.
An interactive demonstration of the system can be
accessed at
Figure 2: The circuit workbench
communicates with a back-end
circuit simulator to show the
correct voltmeter readings and
display each bulb at the
appropriate level of brightness.
available to a wide variety of students. Student interaction
data is logged in a format suitable for data mining and as
training data for machine learning.
Beetle-Grow builds on the success of Beetle II,
a natural-language ITS which has been shown to
be highly effective in teaching basic electricity and
electronics, demonstrating effect sizes of d=1.72 [5].
Beetle II combines natural language dialogue, guided
experimentation, and adaptive feedback to implement the
conceptual change [4] tutoring approach.
In Beetle-Grow, we have added a new browser-based
user interface, allowing multiple remote users to access the
system concurrently. Since the only technical requirement
is an HTML5 compliant browser (such as Google Chrome
or Mozilla Firefox), the system can easily be made
Figure 3: The browser-based user interface uses industry
standard technologies: HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, and the
Play Framework, an open source web programming framework.
User Interface
The user interface (Figure 3) uses a responsive design
optimized for modern browsers, including touch screen
devices such as Android and iPad tablets. It is divided
into panels corresponding to different aspects of the
tutoring process: reading learning materials (Figure 4),
interacting with the tutor (Figure 5), and experimenting
with electrical circuits using a circuit simulator (Figures 1
and 2). The layout is similar to the Beetle II interface,
but redesigned with a friendly and contemporary look and
feel, intended to be attractive to our target user group
(students aged around 13-25).
input and deciding on the next action to take, such as
presenting further learning materials, asking a question,
or giving feedback on a student answer. It communicates
with the back-end components retained from Beetle II,
which handle curriculum management, natural language
processing, answer diagnosis, and tutorial planning.
Figure 4: The learning materials are presented using HTML5,
with scalable text and high quality graphics optimized for
presentation in modern web browsers.
System Architecture
Beetle-Grow is implemented as a distributed system,
in which a web server accepts requests from the GUI
and routes users to the correct page. Lesson progress is
tracked in a database, allowing the student to exit the
lesson at any time and resume later from the start of the
last exercise attempted.
Figure 5: Student input is
visually separated from tutor
feedback and questions in the
chat interface, making the
dialogue easier to follow.
The curriculum covers ten main topics and includes
over 150 questions. Some require the student to select
and connect electrical components in the interactive
circuit workbench to match a circuit diagram shown on
screen. Others expect a written answer of one or two
sentences. There are numerical and yes/ no questions, and
questions asking the student to identify particular circuit
Student input consists of circuits built in the workbench,
text entered in the chat window, and button presses to
request help or to move through the learning materials.
The dialogue manager is responsible for processing the
The tutorial planner does not allow a student to move
on from a question without supplying an answer in the
expected form: either a circuit or some text. Submitted
circuits are compared against the desired circuit answer,
a diagnosis is made, and formative feedback is given; for
example, “There’s a problem with the circuit. The switch
should not be open.” After a third successive failure, the
correct circuit is loaded into the workbench, allowing the
student to proceed.
In contrast, no formative feedback is currently given
for textual answers. Instead, the system simply states
the expected answer and leaves the student to decide
if their own answer was a close enough match. This
behavior corresponds to the tell condition reported
in [5], which demonstrated that asking students for an
explanation and then immediately giving away the correct
answer was highly effective, despite the obvious potential
to ‘game the system’ by typing minimal or nonsense
answers. This approach also avoids the negative effect on
student satisfaction and engagement seen in Beetle II
evaluations due to the limitations of the natural language
understanding and feedback selection modules used there.
Conclusion and Future Work
Beetle-Grow harnesses the proven educational
potential of the Beetle II system and makes it available
to a new audience. The browser-based user interface
makes deployment at scale straightforward. We have
confidence that Beetle-Grow will help students to
learn, while simultaneously allowing us to collect a large
corpus of interaction data for future analysis.
As our next step, we are interested in partnering with
teachers and other education researchers to carry out largescale user trials with Beetle-Grow in the classroom and
remotely. Data from such trials will generate new insights
into the effect of active experimentation on learning in the
domain of basic electricity and electronics.
Student answers and interaction data collected from these
trials can also be used to train statistical algorithms, such
as those described in [6], in order to provide better student
feedback in a future version of Beetle-Grow.
We thank the US Office of Naval Research for their
financial support under Award number N000141410733,
and our colleagues Mary Hutchison and Edmund Farrow
for their contributions to the design and implementation
of the new user interface.
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