WIP: Large Language Model-Enhanced Smart Tutor for Undergraduate Circuit Analysis

TL;DR

This paper introduces a large language model-enhanced AI smart tutor for undergraduate circuit analysis, providing personalized feedback, collecting interaction data, and aiding instructors in identifying student difficulties.

Contribution

It presents the design, deployment, and initial evaluation of an AI-powered smart tutor tailored for circuit analysis education, with plans for broader application and improved functionalities.

Findings

90.9% student satisfaction with the tutor

Collected data reveals common student difficulties

Real-time insights assist targeted instruction

Abstract

This research-to-practice work-in-progress (WIP) paper presents an AI-enabled smart tutor designed to provide homework assessment and feedback for students in an undergraduate circuit analysis course. We detail the tutor's design philosophy and core components, including open-ended question answering and homework feedback generation. The prompts are carefully crafted to optimize responses across different problems. The smart tutor was deployed on the Microsoft Azure platform and is currently in use in an undergraduate circuit analysis course at the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering in a large, public, research-intensive institution in the Southeastern United States. Beyond offering personalized instruction and feedback, the tutor collects student interaction data, which is summarized and shared with the course instructor. To evaluate its effectiveness, we collected student feedback, with 90.9% of responses indicating satisfaction with the tutor. Additionally, we analyze a subset of collected data on preliminary circuit analysis topics to assess tutor usage frequency for each problem and identify frequently asked questions. These insights help instructors gain real-time awareness of student difficulties, enabling more targeted classroom instruction. In future work, we will release a full analysis once the complete dataset is available after the Spring 2025 semester. We also explore the potential applications of this smart tutor across a broader range of engineering disciplines by developing improved prompts, diagram-recognition methods, and database management strategies, which remain ongoing areas of research.