The role of embodied conversational agents in collaborative face to face computer supported learning games

• Studies show that face to face collaborative videogames have a great potential to improve the quality of education in the classroom of the future. Educational games can help pupils increase cognitive skills, increase motivation and reduce the time taken to reach learning objectives. Games used in a group environment can enrich the learning experience further still by helping develop group social skills and exploiting social dynamics toward achieving a common learning objective. Despite these advantages the uptake of collaborative games as learning tools in the classroom is still relatively low. While collaborative working has proven advantages they also suffer from an incompatibility with the ingrained individualism of traditional education. Moreover, collaborative working can disadvantage introverted students, suffer from conflicts within a group or allow less motivated students to avoid making a contribution. The work described in this paper investigates the viability of these disadvantages being managed through the intervention and mediation of an intelligent embodied conversational agent with awareness of group activity acting as a virtual tutor. Here we examine how students perform and collaborate using a variety of games to; learn words in a foreign language, solve mathematical equations, and add missing words to a paragraph of text. These respectively aim to develop the students’ memorization, basic reasoning, and creative vocabulary. Our embodied virtual agent is emulated using a wizard-of-oz set up with a human controlling the embodied agent Samuela using a basic scripted interaction strategy. To qualify our results, they are contrasted with those obtained with an unsupervised group and a group supervised by a human tutor.

Ämnesord

HUMANIORA  -- Konst -- Design (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Arts -- Design (hsv//eng)

Publikations- och innehållstyp

ref (ämneskategori)

kon (ämneskategori)