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Animated Pedagogical Agents: A Survey Jie Yan

Ruth AgadaComputer Science Department

Bowie State University Bowie, Maryland 20715,USA, ttp://www.bowiestate.edu

Introduction

• Studies have shown that effective individual tutoring is the most powerful mode of teaching. • Logically and financially unfeasible.

• Create an animated pedagogical agents.• What is an APA?

Virtual Sign Animated Pedagogical Agents• Designed for dear and hearing impaired people.• Presents sign demonstrations via a series of 3-D graphical animations.

Language learning Animated Pedagogical Agents• Designed to teach children to read• monitors each student’s performance continuously and adapts the study plan• Capable of providing feedback to students

Intelligent Virtual Teaching Environment• Animated Pedagogical Agent is a cognitive agent

• Cognitive agents are based on knowledge• The environment operates on a non-immersed virtual reality where the student has the

feeling of being in a real environment.

Enhancing Learning Environments With APA’s

• Different APA’s with different intentions and audiences• APA’s can:

• Demonstrate tasks (by example)• Use non-verbal cues to grab the students attention• Emotionally connect with students• Must be dynamic and adaptive

Technical Issues

• Behavior• Creating a behavior space

• Believability• Idle time behavior

• Cost of resources• Distribution of software

• Web deployment

• Graphics and animations are important • behavior and derived animations generated from what has to be presented and the available multimedia

resources are just as important.• Animated pedagogical agents offer enormous promise for interactive learning environments.• Despite the progress, much remains to be done.

Conclusion

Abstract

• The development of effective animated pedagogical agents is a topic of rising interest in the computer science community. Studies have shown that effective individual tutoring is the most powerful mode of teaching. These agents are designed to be lifelike autonomous characters that support human learning by creating rich, face – to – face learning interactions. Animate pedagogical agents offer great promise for broadening the bandwidth of tutorial communication and increasing learning environments’ ability to engage and motivate students. It is becoming apparent that this generation of learning technologies will have significant impact on education and training. We aim to discuss several of these agents and the technology behind them, as well as the technical issues they face.

References