• Educational Technology International
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• v.19 no.1
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• pp.61-91
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• 2018

The animated pedagogical agent has been implemented to promote learning outcomes and motivation in multimedia learning. It has been claimed that one of the advantages of using pedagogical agent is persona effect - the personalization or social presence of pedagogical agent can enhance learning engagement and motivation. However, prior research is inconclusive as to whether and how the features of the pedagogical agent have effects on the persona effect. This study investigated whether the similarity between a pedagogical agent and the real instructor in terms of the voice and outlook would improve students' perception of the agent's persona. The study also examined the effect by the size of pedagogical agent on the persona perception. Two experiments were conducted with a total of 115 college students. Experiment 1 indicated a significant main effect of voice on the persona perception. Experiment 2 was conducted to examine whether the size of pedagogical agent would affect the voice effect on the persona perception. The results showed that the instructor-like voice yielded higher persona perception regardless of the pedagogical agent's size. Overall, the study findings indicated that the similarity in voice positively fostered the agent's persona.

• Educational Technology International
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.1-26
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• 2014

The purpose of this study was to develop design principles of both animated pedagogical agents as 'credible' persuasive message source and persuasive fear arousing instructional messages in order to help enhance attitude changes toward a certain issue. Based on the previous pedagogical agent research, this study drew the design principles providing ways to manipulate agent credibility level and fear arousing level of message. Consequently, it specified how to make pedagogical agents perceived less or more credible by learners by manipulating a variety of agent features. For fear arousing message, this study showed how fear arousing messages would be structured into one of three levels: non-threatening, moderately threatening, and strongly threatening. Two different agent conditions and three message conditions were actually developed and experimentally tested with the participants of 40 undergraduate students. The results showed that the agent design principles specified from the previous research worked well enough to make a distinction between the more credible agent and the less credible agent. The overall results of this study may indicate that the design strategies for fear arousing message are retained on the premise of some future refinements.

• Journal of The Korean Association of Information Education
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• v.9 no.4
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• pp.673-684
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• 2005

In this research, we have developed a "computer tutor" that mimics the human tutor with animated tutoring dialog agent and the agent was integrated to teaching-learning material for elementary science subject. The developed system is a natural language based teaching-learning system using one-to-one dialogue. The developed pedagogical dialogue teaching-learning system analysis student's answer then provides appropriate answer or questions after comparing the student's answer with elementary school level achievement. When the agent gives either question or answer it uses the TTS(Text-to-Speech) function. Also the agent has an animated human tutor face for providing more human like feedback. The developed dialogue interface has been applied to 64 6th grade students. The test results show that the test group's average score is higher than the control group by 10.797. This shows that unlike conventional web courseware, our approach that "ask-answer" process and the animated character, which has human tutor's emotional expression, attracts students and helps to immerse to the courseware.

• International Journal of Contents
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• v.14 no.3
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• pp.7-16
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• 2018

The extent and depth of the event plan determines the scope of pedagogical experience in situations and consequently the quality of immersive learning based on our simulated world. In contrast to planning in conventional narrative-based systems mainly pursuing dramatic interests, planning in virtual world-based pedagogical systems strive to provide realistic experiences in immersed situations. Instead of story plot comprising predetermined situations, our inter-event planning method aims at simulating diverse situations that each involve multiple events coupled via their associated agents' conditions and meaningful associations between events occurring in a background world. The specific techniques to realize our planning method include, two-phase planning based on inter-event search and intra-event decomposition (down to the animated action level); autonomous and independent agents to behave proactively with their own belief and planning capability; full-blown background world to be used as the comprehensive stage for all events to occur in; coupling events via realistic association types including deontic associations as well as conventional causality; separation of agents from event roles; temporal scheduling; and parallel and concurrent event progression mechanism. Combining all these techniques, diverse exogenous events can be derived and seamlessly (i.e., semantically meaningfully) integrated with the original event to form a wide scope of situations providing chances of abundant pedagogical experiences. For effective implementation of plan execution, we devise an execution scheme based on multiple priority queues, particularly to realize concurrent progression of many simultaneous events to simulate its corresponding reality. Specific execution mechanisms include modeling an action in terms of its component motions, adjustability of priority for agent across different events, and concurrent and parallel execution method for multiple actions and its expansion for multiple events.