Judy Robertson

The NITE XML Toolkit: Flexible annotation for multimodal language data

Multimodal corpora that show humans interacting via language are now relatively easy to collect. Current tools allow one either to apply sets of time-stamped codes to the data and consider their timing and sequencing or to describe some specific linguistic structure that is present in the data, built over the top of some form of transcription. To further our understanding of human communication, the research community needs code sets with both timings and structure, designed flexibly to address the research questions at hand. The NITE XML Toolkit offers library support that software developers can call upon when writing tools for such code sets and, thus, enables richer analyses than have previously been possible. It includes data handling, a query language containing both structural and temporal constructs, components that can be used to build graphical interfaces, sample programs that demonstrate how to use the libraries, a tool for running queries, and an experimental engine that builds interfaces on the basis of declarative specifications.

Story creation in virtual game worlds

Allowing young people to create computer games they will ultimately want to play not only offers key educational benefits but builds self-esteem and teamwork skills.

Children's narrative development through computer game authoring

Recent research into the educational applications of computer games has focused on the skills which children can develop while playing games. Various benefits of computer game playing have been recorded, such as increased motivation; development of problem solving and discussion skills; and improvement in aspects of story writing. While encouraging children to play appropriately designed computer games can be used to enhance their learning, enabling children to create their own computer games offers a further range of learning opportunities. This paper describes a workshop in which young people learned how to create their own computer role- play games for their friends and family to play. The purpose of the workshop was to give the young people an opportunity to tell stories in the medium of a computer game, and to develop narrative skills such as character creation, plot planning and interactive dialogue writing. Results from this study are used to illustrate the educational benefits of computer games authoring, and to suggest directions for future research in this area.

Ghostwriter: Educational Drama and Presence in a Virtual Environment

Improvisational dramatic role-play activities are used in classrooms to encourage children to explore the feelings of the characters in a story. Role-play exercises can give a story personal significance to each child, and an insight and understanding of the characters and the relationships between them. It can also help the development of moral reasoning by presenting moral dilemmas in concrete situations. This paper presents a desktop virtual environment, Ghostwriter, designed for similar dramatic role-play exercises. We describe the virtual environment and the characters within it and outline relevant previous work in this area. An important concept in the evaluation of the system is presence: the extent to which the role-player experiences social presence in the environment will influence the success of the drama. We present results of an empirical evaluation of the virtual role-play activity with eleven year old school pupils which demonstrate that the pupils experienced social presence during their interactions with the Ghostwriter characters. These results, transcript analysis and interviews, indicate the Ghostwriter is a useful tool for educational drama.

Children's Narrative Development through Computer Game Authoring.

ConclusionsThe strong motivational influence of computer games on children can be used positively within education. This paper looks beyond the educational benefits which children can gain asconsumers of computer games to explore the additional benefits which could be gleaned from enabling children toproduce their own computer games. In the domain of literacy and narrative development, creating an interactive audio-visual computer game to tell a story has many potential benefits. The Game Maker workshop described in the paper confirms that creating stories within computer games is a task which young people find highly enjoyable, engaging and rewarding. Additionally, the workshop experience suggests that sophisticated game design is well within reach of 12–15 year olds. These motivational advantages indicate that it is well worth exploring how computer game authoring can be used in the classroom to raise both literacy standards and children’s enjoyment of story making activities

Feedback on Children's Stories via Multiple Interface Agents

This paper describes StoryStation, an intelligent tutoring system designed to give ten to twelve year old children feedback on their creative writing. The feedback is presented via eight animated interface agents. Each agent gives a different sort of support to the writer including: a thesaurus, a dictionary, feedback on vocabulary and characterisation, help with spelling, help with plot structure, example stories to read and help with the interface itself. This paper focuses on the strategies for generating feedback to the children and discusses some issues in presenting this feedback through the interface agents.

Ghostwriter: a narrative virtual environment for children

Children find computer games extremely motivating and are often prepared to devote large amounts of leisure time to playing them. UK educational policy makers and practitioners have recently started to explore the educational potential of computer games and to consider how their motivational features can be harnessed within the curriculum. This paper describes a fully implemented virtual role-playing environment, Ghostwriter, designed for educational drama development and writing instruction. Ghostwriter was developed using the commercial game engine Unreal and therefore has the same high quality graphics and audio which children are accustomed to playing with at home. Two separate field studies with Ghostwriter have shown the educational value of the system and have confirmed that children are extremely motivated by it

Computer games authored by children: a multi-perspective evaluation

The effects of games on learning and skill development are being examined by a number of researchers [1], although with the notable exception of Kafai [3], much research places children in the role of game consumers. In line with a constructionist approach [4], we believe that allowing children to design and implement their own games will lead to deeper learning and transferable skills.We are investigating the relationship between game creation and the development of childrens narrative skills. Non-programmers can now create 3D interactive virtual reality role-playing games using toolsets that ship with certain commercial games (e.g. Neverwinter Nights). By adapting these toolsets, and the game content, to children, we could develop game creation environments which allow children to author narrative games by creating settings, characters, a plot structure, and possible dialogues for each character. Given the interactive nature of such dialogue, children would need to create multiple plot threads and associated dialogue. Other children could then play the game, and have a potentially different experience each time the game is played. We believe that these types of environments would have a beneficial effect on the development of narrative skills and overall literacy, and have carried out various pilot studies which look at the process of creating role-playing games by children [2, 5].In this paper, we look at the product of game creation, specifically at 3D interactive virtual reality games created by adolescents using the Neverwinter Nights toolset. We feel it is important to determine whether games which are considered to be good from an educational perspective are also good from the perspective of potential game players.To explore this question, we carried out a multi-faceted qualitative study from three perspectives: children, expert game designers, and teachers. As the basis for interaction with the three target groups, we used created by 10 young people aged 12-15 using the Neverwinter Nights toolset [5]. While examining the games, the interviewees discussed the features of successful games. Although there are clear, and expected, differences in perspective between the three groups, there are also common themes.

Children's contributions to new technology: the design of AdventureAuthor

INTRODUCTION This poster describes the design of AdventureAuthor, a tool which allows children to author their own interactive stories for 3D virtual role-play environments. Using AdventureAuthor, children can select characters, objects and settings for a story. They then develop the plot structure of the story as a series of branching paths, which create multiple possible dialogues in the story. In doing so, children define the choice points which occur in the story at each conversational turn as a result of interaction with story objects and dialogue with other characters. The childrens specifications are then realised in a 3D virtual environment. The childs peers can participate in the story by playing the roles of the various characters .

Beyond the Short Answer Question with Research Methods Tutor

Research Methods Tutor is a new intelligent tutoring system created by porting the existing implementation of the AutoTutor system to a new domain, Research Methods in Behavioural Sciences, which allows more interactive dialogues. The procedure of porting allowed for an evaluation of the domain independence of the AutoTutor framework and for the identification of domain related requirements. Specific recommendations for the development of other dialogue-based tutors were derived from our experience.