Narrative-Centered Environments for Guided Exploratory Learning

Narrative-centered learning environments offer significant potential for supporting guided exploratory learning. By taking advantage of the inherent structure of narrative, narrative-centered environments provide students with engaging worlds in which they actively participate in motivating story-based problemsolving activities. Two key challenges posed by narrativecentered environments for guided exploratory learning are (1) supporting the hypothesis-generation-testing cycles that form the basis for exploratory learning, and (2) orchestrating all of the events in the unfolding story to support appropriate levels of student motivation, engagement, and self-efficacy for effective learning. In this paper we propose a narrative-centered architecture for guided exploratory learning environments. The architecture continually constructs and updates narrative plans to support exploratory learning while monitoring the student's progress, observing her behaviors in the interactive environment, and guiding the behaviors of believable agents serving as characters in the stories. The architecture is being used to implement CRYSTAL ISLAND, a prototype narrative-centered guided exploratory learning environment under development in our lab. CRYSTAL ISLAND is a guided exploratory learning environment for the domain of microbiology in which students play the role of a detective solving a science mystery.