TSI-Enhanced Pedagogical Agents to Engage Learners in Virtual Worlds

Building pedagogical applications in virtual worlds is a multi-disciplinary endeavor that involves learning theories, application development framework, and mediated communication theories. This paper presents a project that integrates game-based learning, multi-agent system architecture (MAS), and the theory of Transformed Social Interaction (TSI), The project implements a group of engaging, affectionate and effective pedagogical agents equipped with abilities of selfrepresentation, emotional states reasoning and situational awareness. A prototype of a virtual quiz show, QuizMASter, has been implemented to realize these abilities, and will be used to test for the effectiveness of the approach. Keywordsvirtual quiz games, pedagogical agent, transformed social interaction(TSI) theory, BDI agent, multiagent systems.