The Giant: A Classroom Collaborator

The purpose of this paper is to report on the research involved in the development of a software agent—the Giant — that collaborates with students in their construction and sharing of knowledge. The Giant’s working environment is an educational software tool used by students in and between classrooms to collaborate on a subject of study. Its task is to reason about the student’s beliefs and ideas and automatically generate tentative conclusions. The Giant uses these conclusions to display its own, naïve understanding of the world to the student and asks him to decide upon its soundness. When interacting with the system, students assist the Giant in completing and correcting its propositions. This leads the students to review their personal, other students’, and the Giant’s claims, encouraging them to elaborate on their own knowledge.