Dynamically sequencing an animated pedagogical agent
Brian A Stone, James C. Lester · 1997
One of the most promising opportunities in-troduced by rapid advances in knowledge-based learning environments and multimedia technolo-gies is the possibility of creating animated peda-gogical agents. These agents should exhibit three properties: timely domain coverage (they should clearly communicate fundamental concepts and relationships within the allotted time); contextu-ality (they should provide explanations in appro-priate problem-solving contexts); and continuity (their activities and utterances should be peda-gogically, visually, and aurally coherent). We have developed the coherence-structured be-havior space approach to creating animated ped-agogical agents. This is a two-step approach. First, we design a behavior space of anima-tion and audio segments that are structured by prerequisite relationships and a continuity metric. Second, we navigate coherent paths through the space to dynamically sequence be-haviors. This creates seamless global behav-iors that communicate fundamental knowledge and provide contextualized problem-solving ad-vice. The coherence-structured behavior space approach has been implemented in Herman the Bug, an animated pedagogical agent for Design-A-Plant, a knowledge-based learning environ-ment for botanical anatomy and physiology. For-mative evaluations of the agent with middle school students are encouraging.