The goal of Interactive Pedagogical Drama (IPD) is to exploit the edifying power of story while promoting active learning. An IPD immerses the learner in an engaging, evocative story where she interacts with realistic characters. The learner makes decisions or takes actions on behalf of a character in the story, and sees the consequences of her decisions. The story’s characters are realized by ...

The promise of engaging immersive virtual environments has long been a motivating factor within Virtual Reality (VR). One of the greatest potentials in VR has been in the realm of telling stories and provide new and engaging experiences. Research in Virtual Environments is now shifting its focus to creating structures to enable such stories and experiences. In this paper we present a concept we...

This paper illustrates the powerful role that drama can play in facilitating spiritual development. The opportunities offered through the experience of improvisation are examined through a detailed examination of a single drama session. The children’s engagement in and reflection upon the drama are seen as sensitive vehicles to build a sense of community, increase self knowledge, develop empath...

Recent years have seen growing interest in data-driven approaches to personalized interactive narrative generation and drama management. Reinforcement learning (RL) shows particular promise for training policies to dynamically shape interactive narratives based on corpora of player-interaction data. An important open question is how to design reinforcement learning-based drama managers in order...

The dangers of pseudoscience – parapsychology, astrology, creationism, etc. – are widely criticized. Lessons in the history of science are often viewed as an educational remedy by conveying the nature of science. But such histories can be flawed. In particular, many stories romanticize scientists, inflate the drama of their discoveries, and oversimplify the process of science. They are, literal...

Although drama exposure has been examined in the context of health promotion programs, the underlying mechanisms of reflecting on drama have not been established. The degree to which drama contemplation leads to cognitive changes (increased processing, self-compassion and emotional self-efficacy) and improved well-being was examined in the present research. An experiment was conducted in which ...

The goal of this research is to lay the foundations for a formal theory of drama, that abstracts from the procedural and interactive aspects involved in the generation of dramatic content. The theory characterizes dramatic qualities by reconciling the structural accounts provided by traditional drama analysis with an agent-based perspective on characters. 1 Motivations and Formalization In the ...

It is only by chance that southern Chinese theater, nanxi 南戲, began its known textual career with two revenge love stories, both concerning ungratefulness and retribution. one, Zhao the Chaste Maid and Second Son Cai (Zhao Zhennü Cai Erlang 趙貞女蔡二郎), has come to us transformed into a dramatic exemplar of duty and filiality, and the other, the story of Wang Kui 王魁, has survived in song and short-...

Stories have long been theorized to influence how we perceive our social world and our peers. Empirical research on this topic has begun to grow, with many studies exploring how stories and social cognition relate, across a range of different approaches. In order to structure past work and guide future investigations, this article presents a research framework that formalizes how, when, andwhy ...