The Educational and Professional Online Training Lab*

Learning can be easy, or it can be hard. Over the years, research in Cognitive Science and the Learning Sciences have taught us much about how to improve learning with the use of technology. The TEAPOT lab develops and tests learning systems and the technologies that support them.

• Human-to-human tutoring has shown it to be remarkably effective, even when the tutor is not an expert tutor. Can we use the same types of interactions to improve student learning with dialog-based intelligent tutoring systems?
• Learning is similar to working out. More "reps" leads to more results. So motivation is critical for keeping learners engaged. Games can be very motivating. Can we just harness their motivational superpowers to improve education?
• Language is the medium of communication and education. And literacy skills are critical for becoming strong citizens. What are the fundamental processes in reading with deep understanding? How can we best support them?

• Research Methods Tutor: a dialog-based intelligent tutoring system for Research Methods in Psychology
• LispTutorJr: a tutoring system for the Lisp programming language
• Advisor to the King: a serious game for teaching analysis of texts

• Artificial Intelligence in Education
• Latent Semantic Analysis
• Natural Language Processing
• Serious Games