Conversational Characters that Support Interactive Play and Learning for Children
Andrea Corradini, Manish Mehta, Klaus Robering · 2009
Play is more than just entertainment for children. It is a fundamental activity that supports them in developing communication skills, managing feelings and emotions, learning the foundations of social rules, and abstracting concepts. The efforts to exploit the motivation and engagement that computer games naturally offer have recently given rise to a tremendous interest in the use of game-like applications for training and learning. Such kind of applications shifts the player into the participant role and acts as a catalyzer that turns an interactive session into a learning-by-doing experience. Differently from the traditional teacher-based learning paradigm, such a constructivist approach places the learner at the center of the learning process. It is also indisputable that computers are compelling for children and adolescents. By giving them the control on the pace and kind of actions, they can repeat any activity as often as they like and experiment with variations. Hence, appropriate software can engage children in creative play, problem solving, and conversation with positive effects on their cognitive and social learning and development (Clements 1994; Haugland & Shade 1994). Technology for children broadly falls into two categories: educational products and digital entertainment. Edutainment is what results in blending these two genres and it is also the framework of the system we have developed. We have created an aesthetically elegant, entertaining and intellectually challenging interactive architecture for young people of age ranging from 10 to 18 years to play and interact with a synthetic conversational agent impersonating the Danish historical luminary Hans Christian Andersen. The conceptual goal of the project was to allow children and teenagers to collect information representing an organic history and a coherent body of knowledge through conversation and narrative in a funny way. The underlying idea was that a combination of an educational informative system and a gaming environment into a single application offers new opportunities towards more effective and rewarding learning experience. Technically, the task of building game-like interfaces populated by conversational characters represents a tremendous challenge for the research community and involves several large research questions: how to deal with children spoken language, how to deliver the appropriate behavior and information over different modalities in an interesting and engaging manner in every given dialogue situation, how to present a wide spectrum and depth content structure, how to keep up with a dialogue over virtually any topic without interrupting the flow of conversation in case of misunderstanding or out of domain topics, and many more. At the same time, we had to face usuability issues related to the target users of the system. For instance, we had to account for the importance of emotions in a learning process. Depressed or anxious children cannot assimilate new knowledge and learn as effectively. Therefore the assessment and/or display of emotions play an important role and help in improving the effectiveness of computer-based learning environments populated with