Sylvie Girard

Developing affective educational software products: Sorémo, a new method for capturing emotional states

One means of identifying successful product designs relates to the evocation of positive emotions in users. This is particularly true of educational software designs where evoking positive emotions motivates interaction with the software. In this article, a description is given of the participatory design, development, evaluation, and use of a non-verbal, self-reporting instrument Sorémo to measure childrens emotional states while using educational software. Researchers and designers of childrens educational software products alike are interested in capturing the emotional impact of application features on users’ actions and learning processes. Sorémo will be used to gain emotional feedback of a childs interaction with an open learner modelling tutoring system, which represents knowledge about childrens learning progress, personal characteristics, and so on. The reported cross-cultural studies adopted a participatory-design approach, to create an instrument usable by French and English children. During the design process, the emotional responses to software, of French and English school children aged 4–13, were investigated. The article includes an evaluation of the method involving children using the instrument to represent emotional states. Future plans comprise deploying the method to design affective educational software products and assessing the impact on the childrens learning experiences.

Designing affective animations with children as design partners using role-playing

This paper describes a user-centred participatory-design method, novel to the domain of interaction design of affective components for learning, for gathering user requirements from children. The method was considered to be suitable and appealing for children in terms of participating in design, and led to the definition of a sample of digital animations that portray a set of emotional states. The methods main novelty lies in the use of real actors as design partners to express affect, and includes comic strips in the data gathered. This method is believed of value for future design of affective components in educational context by, and for, children.

Designing affective computing learning companions with teachers as design partners.

There is a growing interest in studying the potential of including models of emotion in Embodied Pedagogical Agents (EPA), included in Computer-Assisted Learning (CAL) software. Childrens understanding and response to emotions matures alongside their cognitive development. Any model of emotions embedded in an EPA will impact childrens responses, and use of the EPA characters. Therefore EPA design should include both user characteristics and the pedagogical purposes behind the CAL system. This paper presents the participatory design of an EPAs affective responses to childrens interaction with mathematical software. The participatory design sessions were performed with teachers as partners in designing the affective learning components. The results of a pilot study on childrens responses to the emotional sequence defined in the model will be introduced, as a separate study. Finally, a plan of future research is presented to further validate the models potential for CAL systems, including the integration two software learning applications constructed during the design sessions with teachers

Designing and evaluating affective open-learner modeling tutors

Research in educational technology is interested in the creation of learning environments providing an optimized learning experience for its users. Researchers have been seeking design methods and techniques that help create applications capturing the users attention without distracting him/her from the task at hand. However, there are few ergonomics guidelines, design or evaluation principles/heuristics currently available concerning the learner modeling component of educational software designed for children. The research aims to investigate the impact of embedded interactive user models and emotive interface personas in educational software for primary school children. The contribution of the work will provide an understanding of the design and evaluation techniques that can be used to create attractive learner models, easily accessible and understandable by children, through the use of affective components.