Mendelian Genetics Cognitive Tutor

For my 05–432 class, our assignment was to create a cognitive tutor that allows science students to find all possible phenotypes for two different alleles using Mendelian Genetics. This is meant to help students exhaust all possible paths when given two alleles.

Background Information:

Each offspring inherits one gene allele from each parent and Punnett squares are used to find all possible phenotypes and alleles from the parents.

Example Punnett Square for Mendelian Genetics

To begin, my partner and I studied the task domain and wrote out the English rules 1 that capture inferences that combine partial and full conclusions drawn from multiple crosses.

English Rules to Show all Partial and Full Conclusions

Next, my partner and I completed the model by adding four more rules in the Nools code:

1. selectCross: This rule allows the student to enter the two strains in order for them to be crossed. The tutor then prints the offsprings’ phenotypes.
2. inferFromCross: This rule allows the tutor to generate inferences based on the information given.
3. makeInferences: This rule allows the tutor to generate additional inferences.
4. enterInferences: This rule allows for the partial and full conclusions to be entered.

We had to write the code for the rule inferFromCross. This rule allows the tutor to generate inferences based on the information given.

Nools Code for rule selectFirstStrain.

Nools code for rule inferFromCross 1 of 4.

Nole code for rule inferFromCross 2 of 4.

We had to write the code for the rule makeInferences. This rule allows the tutor to generate additional inferences.

Nools Code for rule makeInferences 1 of 6.

We had to write the code for the rule enterInferences. This rule allows for the partial and full conclusions to be entered.

Interface and Console:

In the console, we used different commands in the interface such as: setTracerLogFlags(“sai_check”, “conflictTree”) which traces the conflict tree.

We tested our interfaces with two different flowers: FoxGlove and Lupine. FoxGlobe has three different strains of Magenta-1, White-1, and White-2.

Mendelian Genetics Interface with the FoxGlove flower with three different strains.

Lupine has three different strains of Pink-1, Blue-1, and Blue-2. We tested our tutors to find all possible partial and final conclusions.

Mendelian Genetics Interface with the Lupine flower with three different strains.