Transforming Learning through Agent Augmented Virtual World
Han Yu, Zhiqi Shen, Chor Ping Low, Chunyan Miao · 2008
Recent years have seen new forms of immersive learning such as interactive storytelling in virtual learning environment. Intelligent software agents are able to provide a more attractive narrative and get the users more involved in the unfolding of the story line in the virtual world. However, designing and implementing a software agent or a multi-agent system (MAS) for this purpose requires the developer to be highly skilled in agent oriented software engineering (AOSE) and a large investment in time and effort. This raises the hurdle to develop non-trivial agent augmented interactive e-learning applications. Our research proposes a framework - the multi-agent development environment (MADE) - to resolve this problem by abstracting the agent implementation part into a reusable runtime environment so as to enable less technically inclined people (e.g. teachers) and developers with limited knowledge in AOSE to rapidly prototype a multi-agent system to be incorporated into interactive learning applications.