H. Chad Lane

Ada and grace: toward realistic and engaging virtual museum guides

To increase the interest and engagement of middle school students in science and technology, the InterFaces project has created virtual museum guides that are in use at the Museum of Science, Boston. The characters use natural language interaction and have near photoreal appearance to increase and presents reports from museum staff on visitor reaction.

Coached program planning: dialogue-based support for novice program design

Coached program planning is a dialogue-based style of tutoring aimed at helping novices during the early stages of program writing. The intent is to help novices understand and solve problems in their own words through the construction of natural-language style pseudocode as the first step in solving a programming problem. We have designed an environment supporting coached program planning and have used it in a human-to-human, computer-mediated evaluation of 16 novice programmers enrolled in a pre-CS1 programming course at the University of Pittsburgh. The results show that students who underwent coached program planning, compared to those who did not, were more prolific with comments in their programs, committed fewer structural mistakes, and exhibited less erratic programming behavior during their implementation. The dialogues collected from this experiment followed a clear 4-step pattern. Starting with this observation, we are developing a dialogue-based intelligent tutoring system called the Pseudocode Tutor to support coached program planning.

Intelligent tutoring goes to the museum in the big city: a pedagogical agent for informal science education

In this paper, we describe Coach Mike, a virtual staff member at the Boston Museum of Science that seeks to help visitors at Robot Park, an interactive exhibit for computer programming. By tracking visitor interactions and through the use of animation, gestures, and synthesized speech, Coach Mike provides several forms of support that seek to improve the experiences of museum visitors. These include orientation tactics, exploration support, and problem solving guidance. Additional tactics use encouragement and humor to entice visitors to stay more deeply engaged. Preliminary analysis of interaction logs suggest that visitors can follow Coach Mikes guidance and may be less prone to immediate disengagement, but further study is needed.

The Effects of a Pedagogical Agent for Informal Science Education on Learner Behaviors and Self-efficacy

We describe Coach Mike, an animated pedagogical agent for informal computer science education, and report findings from two experiments that provide initial evidence for the efficacy of the system. In the first study, we found that Coach Mike’s presence led to 20% longer holding times, increased acceptance of programming challenges, and reduced misuse of the exhibit, but had limited cumulative impact on attitudes, awareness, and knowledge beyond what the host exhibit already achieved. In the second study, we compared two different versions of Coach Mike and found that the use of enthusiasm and self-regulatory feedback led to greater self-efficacy for programming.

Virtual Humans for Learning

Virtual humans are computer-generated characters designed to look and behave like real people. Studies have shown that virtual humans can mimic many of the social effects that one finds in human-human interactions such as creating rapport, and people respond to virtual humans in ways that are similar to how they respond to real people. We believe that virtual humans represent a new metaphor for interacting with computers, one in which working with a computer becomes much like interacting with a person and this can bring social elements to the interaction that are not easily supported with conventional interfaces. We present two systems that embody these ideas. The first, the Twins are virtual docents in the Museum of Science, Boston, designed to engage visitors and raise their awareness and knowledge of science. The second SimCoach, uses an empathetic virtual human to provide veterans and their families with information about PTSD and depression.

Feedback Specificity and the Learning of Intercultural Communication Skills

The role of explicit feedback in learning has been studied from a variety of perspectives and in many contexts. In this paper, we examine the impact of the specificity of feedback delivered by an intelligent tutoring system in a game-based environment for cultural learning. We compared two versions: one that provided only “bottom-out” hints and feedback versus one that provided only conceptual messages. We measured during-training performance, in-game transfer, and long-term retention. Consistent with our hypotheses, specific feedback utterances produced inferior learning on the in-game transfer task when compared to conceptual utterances. No differences were found on a web-based post-test. We discuss possible explanations for these findings, particularly as they relate to the learning of loosely defined skills and serious games.

AI Grand Challenges for Education

This article focuses on contributions that AI can make to address long-term educational goals. It describes five challenges that would support: (1) mentors for every learner; (2) learning twenty-first century skills; (3) interaction data to support learning; (4) universal access to global classrooms; and (5) lifelong and life-wide learning. A vision and brief research agenda are described for each challenge along with goals that lead to access to global educational resources and the reuse and sharing of digital educational resources. Instructional systems with AI technology are described that currently support richer experiences for learners and supply researchers with new opportunities to analyze vast data sets of instructional behavior from big databases, containing elements of learning, affect, motivation, and social interaction. Personalized learning is described using computational tools that enhance student and group experience, reflection, and analysis, and supply data for development of novel theory development.

Developing INOTS to support interpersonal skills practice

The Immersive Naval Officer Training System (INOTS) is a blended learning environment that merges traditional classroom instruction with a mixed reality training setting. INOTS supports the instruction, practice and assessment of interpersonal communication skills. The goal of INOTS is to provide a consistent training experience to supplement interpersonal skills instruction for Naval officer candidates without sacrificing trainee throughput and instructor control. We developed an instructional design from cognitive task analysis interviews with experts to serve as a framework for system development. We also leveraged commercial student response technology and research technologies including natural language recognition, virtual humans, realistic graphics, intelligent tutoring and automated instructor support tools. In this paper, we describe our methodologies for developing a blended learning environment, and our challenges adding mixed reality and virtual human technologies to a traditional classroom to support interpersonal skills training.1 2

Investigating the relationship between presence and learning in a serious game

We investigate the role of presence in a serious game for intercultural communication and negotiation skills by comparing two interfaces: a 3D version with animated virtual humans and sound against a 2D version using text-only interactions with static images and no sound. Both versions provide identical communicative action choices and are driven by the same underlying simulation engine. In a study, the 3D interface led to a significantly greater self-reported sense of presence, but produced significant, but equivalent learning on immediate posttests for declarative and conceptual knowledge related to intercultural communication. Log data reveals that 3D learners needed fewer interactions with the system than those in the 2D environment, suggesting they benefited equally with less practice and may have treated the experience as more authentic.

Virtual humans with secrets: learning to detect verbal cues to deception

Virtual humans are animated, lifelike characters capable of free-speech and nonverbal interaction with human users In this paper, we describe the development of two virtual human characters for teaching the skill of deception detection An accompanying tutoring system provides solicited hints on what to ask during an interview and unsolicited feedback that identifies properties of truthful and deceptive statements uttered by the characters We present the results of an experiment comparing use of virtual humans with tutoring against a no-interaction (baseline) condition and a didactic condition The didactic group viewed a slide show consisting of recorded videos along with descriptions of properties of deception and truth-telling Results revealed that both groups significantly outperformed the no-interaction control group in a binary decision task to identify truth or deception in video statements No significant differences were found between the training conditions.