However engineers have to adapt continuously to a rapidly changing world. Merely mastering a few skills proves to be insufficient. Precise knowledge of technical concepts is also essential.
Presenting conceptual knowledge in a context of skill acquisition or of problem solving may be of course a good way to teach concepts. But this approach is not the only one, and should involve a qualitative measure of student's performance: errors are indeed important and complex events that are often linked to underlying misconceptions.
We will present the SAVANT 3 system that was specifically designed to teach concepts. This system is able to argue with the student about technical notions. Our aim is to reproduce the kind of relation that may exist between a student and a human private teacher. We believe that a good way to achieve this is to try to mimic argumentation as we observe it in natural conversations.
SAVANT 3 is still in development. Its main feature, compared to other ICAL systems, is that authoring time is reduced: less than 20 logical rules are typically necessary for SAVANT 3 to discuss about a given topic.
keywords: ICAL - egineering education - concepts - conversation - learning