This thesis demonstrates how the use of a global context can improve the power of a local character recognizer. The global context considered is a computer tutor of high school algebra that observes a student working algebra problems on a graphics tablet. The tutoring system is integrated with a character recognizer to understand the pen strokes of an algebra tutoring system is designed and implemented. This thesis joins together two users of a computer, intelligent tutoring and tablet communication. Natural communication with computers has been pursued through speech understanding, English text understanding, special purpose languages, hand printing and graphics. This work extends the power of hand-printing understanders by using more varied and higher level sources of knowledge than have been used previously.
