Pedagogical agents are user interface agents embedded in interactive learning environments to provide awareness of social interaction and knowledge building. We have developed and evaluated pedagogical agents for computer supported collaborative learning (CSCL) scenarios. These scenarios, which are open-ended, have stimulated our interest in customizable (end-user modifiable) agents. We have bu...

Embodied Pedagogical Agents (EPA) are increasingly employed in educational applications, for a variety of users and purposes. However, studies have shown that visual appearance, communicative style, and pedagogical roles of agents impact their acceptance, trust, and user interaction [1, 2, 3, 4]. In this paper, we present a study where 86 primary school children (aged 7-11) chose an EPA to ‘acc...

This paper reports the results of an experimental study on multimedia learning environments, which investigated the impact that increasing the social behaviors of a pedagogical agent has on students’ perceptions of social presence, their perceptions of the learning experience, and learning. Paradoxically, in this experiment students detected higher degrees of social presence in both the text on...

Pedagogical agent research seeks to exploit Reeves and Nass’s Media Equation, 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 pedagogical...

This paper presents the multimedia product for teaching Natural Sciences to 10-12 years old children. In this product three pedagogical agents, Teacher and two pupils guide the learner through the virtual environment. The inclusion of a team of pedagogical agents permits us to create a micro-model of lesson activity and gives a reliable support of individual learner differences. The script-base...

Co-adapted learning involves complex, dynamically unfolding interactions between human and artificial pedagogical agents (PAs) during learning with intelligent systems. In general, these interactions lead to effective learning when (1) learners correctly monitor and regulate their cognitive and metacognitive processes in response to internal (e.g., accurate metacognitive judgments followed by t...

There has been a significant amount of research in application of intelligent agent technology in virtual training and pedagogical environments. The characteristics of intelligent agents, such as flexible behaviour, autonomy and socialablity make them highly suitable candidates to overcome the shortcomings of the traditional course management systems, online learning and Web resources available...

As intelligent agent and virtual world technologies advanced to new heights in the current decade, researchers from diverse fields have started to look into possible ways of applying these emerging technologies to improve e-learning systems. Nevertheless, most attempts focused on using pedagogical agents to achieve traditional e-learning goals which place heavy emphasis on learning outcomes. In...

Embodied Pedagogical Agents (EPA) are increasingly employed in educational applications, for a variety of users and purposes. However, studies have shown that visual appearance, communicative style, and pedagogical roles of agents impact their acceptance, trust, and user interaction [1, 2, 3, 4]. In this paper, we present a study where 86 primary school children (aged 7-11) chose an EPA to ‘acc...

Interactive drama is increasingly being used as a pedagogical tool in a wide variety of computer-based learning environments. However, the effort required to build interactive dramas is quite significant. We built Thespian, an architecture that supports faster development of IPDs, open-ended interaction, encoding of pedagogical goals and quantitative metrics for evaluating those goals. Thespian...