SmartTutor: Creating IDE-based interactive tutorials via editable replay

Interactive tutorials, like Eclipse's cheat sheets, are good for novice programmers to learn how to perform tasks (e.g., checking out a CVS project) in an Integrated Development Environment (IDE). Creating these tutorials often requires programming effort that is time-consuming and difficult. In this paper, we propose an approach using editable replay of user actions to help authors create interactive tutorials with little programming effort. User actions of performing a task can be recorded, edited, and presented as a tutorial. The tutorial can be replayed interactively for mentoring. We present our SmartTutor implementation in the Eclipse IDE and conduct a preliminary evaluation on it, which demonstrates efficiency gains for the tutorial authors.