Binary Card Tutor

This was my first ever full CTAT[1] tutor. I built it during CMU’s LearnLab summer school. I wanted to make an ITS (Intelligent Tutoring System) that was more than just text boxes for students to type in. So I decided to work with binary number conversion. Instead of just converting a decimal to a binary number, the student can visualize what the binary number looks like.



Some cool elements

It won’t let you enter the binary number values until you flip the cards over to display the correct number of dots.

Each CTAT tutor has a skill bar that can be used to track a student’s skill improvement over time.



Improvements I would make

  • Bug: it still says “until only 2 dots are visible”. It should change with the problem and say “6”.
  • It should explicitly teach that a “1” means the card is face up and a “0” means the card is face down.



[1] CTAT stands for “Cognitive Tutor Authoring Tools”. It’s a CMU-built system for building “Intelligent Tutoring Systems”.