Emotive characters can make learning more productive and enjoyable: It takes two to learn to Tango
Year: 2007

In this paper we explore a new direction for pedagogical computer agents, also called computer characters, which we believe will maximize students' learning gains and enjoyment. To the traditional scenario where students interact primarily with a single coach or tutor character on screen, we introduce the addition of both a social, animate colearner, and the student's own avatar character. Variations of the colearner's attributes, informed by research literature on human partners, are explored through an online testbed application of English language idioms. Results from an experimental study with 76 Japanese college students reveal that cooperative colearners have a positive impact on students' performance and experience, as well as increasing perceptions of the character's intelligence and credibility. Findings provide grounding for a fruitful new direction for pedagogical characters, where students learn alongside emotional companions. Computer Characters and Pedagogical Applications: A Perfect Match Drawing inspiration from traditional cartoon animation and comic layout processes, computer characters resemble actors in their emotional range and improvisational responses. Appearing on screen as embodied entities whether humans, or anthropomorphized objects and animals these agents facilitate our interactions with software applications and are rapidly gaining prevalence in our everyday online activities. Embodied conversational characters bring with them a host of social expectations and behavior patterns. In situations where time and efficiency are of the essence, the added layer of a social exchange may add to the cognitive load of the human interacting with them. Yet for cases when the social aspects of the interaction are the center, or central to, the human interactor's objective, characters rule the day and with good reason! Computer characters have been shown to be effective proxy sellers, customer service representatives, and teachers, by engaging us consciously or unconsciously through life like language, presence and behaviors. Of particular importance for the educational domain, computer characters generate additional interest and motivation in the content presented, as well as influence proactive changes in everyday behavior. In fact, computer characters are perhaps the best interface modality for teaching and learning because they allow for mimicry and mirroring, fundamental aspects of learning. Beyond the explicit lesson plan, educational exchanges are fraught with implicit social content and tacit knowledge that instructors model for students. Through learning and teaching, we implement information gathering and problem solving skills that best exemplify our cultural practices and beliefs, whether the subject matter are skateboard moves on staircases learned from peers, algebra or Shakespeare in the classroom, or customization of characters in online gaming environments. Every day, societal values and norms for acceptable behaviors, affective and motivational exchanges, role models and speech patterns, are taught alongside lessons in classrooms around the globe. The richness of the social and emotional exchanges that make computer characters challenging to integrate in productivity suite applications make them ideal for communicating these additional channels of expressiveness in educational content, through their gestures, word choice, affective reactions, and facial expressions, among others (Maldonado and Hayes Roth, 2004) Characters can reliably showcase the same pattern of behavior, with slight improvisations, for many users. This makes computer agents particularly interesting from the researchers' perspective, leading to detailed analysis of different learning effects and behaviors based on each student's characteristics and preferred learning situations. Pedagogical characters, have appeared in language learning applications, middle school curricula, oral storytelling, corporate training, health behavior change interventions, and even military instruction. Yet research and industry applications including embodied conversational computer characters in pedagogical domains have structured the interaction as a one to one tutoring or coaching intervention. The learner primarily interacts with one character on the screen at a time; when more than one character is present simultaneously in the application, their roles tend to be supplementary or supportive ones, providing background tips for the interaction as an articulate "Help" menu, or acting as movie extras in the background.  Learning together online We believe that giving the student a virtual presence in the environment, and enriching the learner's world with a colearner, will lead to greater gains in learning and enjoyment of the educational application. To evaluate these claims, we have designed and built online application testbeds, with which we vary characteristics of the colearne,r according to research based predictions of factors that maximize achievement and enjoyment. We'll report in this article on the eSchool application, focused on teaching Japanese college students American idioms. This system has shown great promise for breaking free of the traditional paradigm of a single interactive character on the screen (for detailed discussion on these experiments, please refer to Maldonado el al, 2005) Today, computer characters exhibiting realistic behaviors in the pedagogical arena tend to follow three primary models, mirroring Taylor's 1980 taxonomy of computer usage in schools: tutor, tool and tutee. Characters may be cast as expert teachers or coaches, presented as role play partners in simulations of real world situations, or act as learners whom the human student teaches. Most often, computer characters inhabit the role of expert or knowledgeable teacher, experienced coach, or erudite tutor. The second category, where characters are presented as partners in role play simulations is prevalent for on the job training and eLearning situations, is prevalent in cases where the learner may be older and more experienced. Computer characters act as colleagues and coworkers, with whom the student practices concepts, strategies, and behaviors. The third mode of interaction with computer characters prevalent today presents the computer character as a learner, progressing alongside the human student, or being taught by him or her. Peer characters are perceived as possessing as no more content knowledge on the subject as the human learner, and often less. When students teach the peer character, the cyclical act of preparing content for teaching, and successfully communicating it becomes the learning experience in itself. In the last twenty years since Taylor published his taxonomy, we have developed the technologies to implement and render believable, animate characters, yet we have made comparatively little progress in developing applications for these characters that maximize the social and emotional relationship with human interactors. For starters, the human student tends to be implicitly present alongside the character, rather than visually embodied on screen, and the interaction is limited to exchanges between the human learner and a single computer character. Few graphical representations of the human interactors appear on screen in pedagogical applications, despite how common these "avatars" are in commercial sociable applications and games. We propose a radical reframing of the learning context in which students interact with animated pedagogical computer characters, which we believe will maximize the students' learning gains and enjoyment.  Our Experimental Testbed In the eSchool application we have developed, students interact with two computer characters at the same time, a teacher and a peer fellow student, within one screen. Students are themselves represented through an avatar, who they can direct in emotional and subject matter responses. The avatar's conversational behaviors and gestures are autonomously derived from the directions of the human learner and this learner's answers to the questions. This mode of interaction is perceived as more natural than avatars whose behaviors are minutely controlled by the users. The colearner, or classmate, learning alongside the human student, has no additional knowledge on the subject nor explanations to provide, and is called to answer questions as often as the student, on average; it also exchanges friendly banter with the student's avatar. We have introduced this presence in the learning environment to determine the effects that learning alongside a social animate character has upon the student's performance and attitudes, rather than using the colearner to elicit nuanced explanations from the student, or model understanding, as is the case with some intelligent tutoring systems.  2003 for Handhelds featuring cartoon characters Figure 2: eSchool 2005 for the PC featuring photorealistic characters Figure 1 shows the first eSchool interface for handheld computers using cartoon characters, and Figure 2, the current interface on a PC using photographic images at the same moment in the interaction. In both cases the teacher character is located on the upper right hand side of the screen, above the chalkboard, which displays the multiple choice interpretations the student must decide between, mimicking the learning space of a classroom. In Figure 1, the students' avatar is Neko the cat, and the colearner is Taro the Tiger, while in Figure 2 the students' avatar is Susy and the colearner is Ryota. Each of the three interactors has their own emotions and embodiment. The content of our learning application is an intermediate English language lesson, with accompanying video and evaluation instruments, primarily aimed at Japanese college students. Students progress through multiple choice questions about American idioms (such