Animated pedagogical agents are lifelike virtual characters designed to augment learning. A review of developmental psychology literature led to the hypothesis that the temporal contingency of such agents would promote human learning. We developed a Pedagogical Agent with Gaze Interaction (PAGI), an experimental animated pedagogical agent that engages in gaze interaction with students. In this ...

Pedagogical agents hold great promise for enhancing the learning experience of students within intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs). There is mounting evidence that ITSs lead to improved student learning (Beal, Walles, Arroyo, & Woolf, 2007; Schroeder, Adesope, & Gilbert, 2013) and in some cases have been found to be nearly as effective as one-on-one human tutoring (VanLehn, 2011). The timely an...

Pedagogical agent research seeks to exploit Reeves and Nass’s Media Equation theory, which holds that users respond to interactive media as if they were social actors. Investigations have tended to focus on the media used to realize the pedagogical agent, e.g., the use of animated talking heads and voices, and the results have been mixed. This paper focuses instead on the manner in which a peda...

A Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) was supplemented with affective artificial study companions to aid summarisation. To motivate students the companions were made believable by implementing opposite ‘affectations’ or behaviour-based believable personalities realised as animated agents. The agents were carefully evolved through the use of a user-centred Wizard-of-Oz (WoZ) approach then subsequ...

MathGirls is computer-based algebra designed for high school girls learning algebra I. Given that girls are in general more interested in interactive computing and more positive about the social presence of pedagogical agents, the primary goal of MathGirls is to provide a girl-friendly learning environment that helps enhance girls’ self-efficacy beliefs in and motivation towards learning algebr...

Human service educators have long struggled with how to best provide students with the communication skills required of entry-level human service professionals. Traditional methods of teaching in this domain have included role-plays and case studies. While teaching such skills is easier in a traditional face-to-face environment, this issue has become more complex due to the emphasis on delivery...

Research has shown that learning programs with well designed animated virtual pedagogical agents engage and motivate students, produce greater reported satisfaction and enjoyment by students, and produce greater learning gains than programs without these agents. How to design an animated virtual pedagogical agent behaves much like a sensitive and effective human tutor is a very challenge work t...

The paper presents SmartEgg, an animated pedagogical agent developed for SQLT-Web, an intelligent SQL tutor on the Web. It has been shown in previous studies that pedagogical agents have a significant motivational impact on students. Our hypothesis was that even a very simple and constrained agent, like SmartEgg, would enhance learning. We report on an evaluation study that confirmed our hypoth...