1,720,960 research outputs found
Gaming@School: Combining virtual learning environments and intelligent pedagogical agents for a new approach to classroom lessons
No full textThe term "digital native" coined by Prensky in 2001-perfectly describes the nowadays students that continuously deal with technology. Thus, technology should be a prominent part of the learning process and should be intended as a support for teachers and learners. In this work, we propose a constructivist approach in which youngsters are called to be the main actors of the learning process and in which a personal construction of their knowledge is a must, starting from their needs and their motivations. Role playing games fit very well these requirements. The approach that we propose in this work combines two fundamental aspects (that commonly are not combined): the integration of Intelligent Pedagogical Agents - IPAs (that provide personalized instruction, increase learner motivation, and act pedagogically on behalf of the learner) in Virtual Learning Environments - VLEs (that add value to the educational process by giving new possibilities and computational-richness support). In this work, we propose that each student has her own IPA (on her own personal device) that guides her throughout the role playing game. © The Authors, 201
Building an emotional IPA through empirical design with high- school students
No full textAs suggested by Woolf, one of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) grand challenges in education is "mentors for every learner". Mentors can be implemented as Intelligent Pedagogical Agents (IPAs) in order to motivate students: "The first way such systems [IPAs] must evolve is to directly address 21st century skills such as creativity, critical thinking, communication, collaboration, information literacy, and self-direction." AI provides the tools to build computational models of student's skills and scaffold learning. Further, AI methods can act as catalyst in learning environments to provide knowledge about the domain, students, and teaching strategies through integration of cognitive and emotional modelling, knowledge representation, reasoning, natural language question answering, and machine learning methods. In this paper, we describe the design and development of an Intelligent Pedagogical Agent that will guide the students through the use of a Serious Game implemented to teach STEM subjects. The use of IPAs is proposed as a support during the game evolution because they act as learning facilitators and guide the learners in the virtual environment by explaining topics, answering questions, giving feedbacks, helping the learners to collaborate with others, providing personalized learning support. The IPA that we propose in this paper behaves along two paths: Emotional, as the interaction depends on the feelings of the student, and pedagogical, i.e., by giving tips and advices related to the topics and to the tasks assigned. The emotional part of the IPA has been built conducting a study on emotions with high school students. On top of the results coming from the study, it has been built an Android application that uses the IPA as a standalone application to prove the efficacy of the IPA itself
Robotic teaching assistant for "Tower of Hanoi" problem
No full textIn our work, we are investigating the effectiveness of robotics in education. Rather than creating excitement for children when playing with robots in games, we are examining the overall learning environment where a robot becomes a teaching assistant. Also, we design a suitable lesson plan when groups of children participate in activities involving the use of the robot. We first make experiments for the robot to solve "Tower of Hanoi" problem. Second, we designed a lesson plan to teach the "Tower of Hanoi" problem using a KUKA youBot as a teaching assistant. The experiment involved two groups of children: one group was taught with the robot and the other group without the robot. Finally, we present results of a questionnaire study by some experiments with different groups of children for competition and validation
Robotic teaching assistance for the "tower of Hanoi" problem
No full textIn this work the authors investigate the effectiveness of robotics in education. Rather than creating excitement for children when playing with robots in games, they are examining the overall learning environment where a robot acts as a teaching assistant. They designed a suitable lesson plan when groups of teenagers participate in activities involving the use of the robot: the authors first performed experiments for the robot to solve the "Tower of Hanoi" problem; then, they designed a lesson plan to teach the "Tower of Hanoi" problem using a KUKA youBot as a teaching assistant. The experiment involved two groups of students: one group was taught with the robot and the other group without the robot. Finally, the authors present results of a comparative study based on questionnaires, in order to understand if the effectiveness of the teaching has been greater with the robot as teaching assistant
Conquering an exo-planet through the use of a virtual role playing game assisted by an emotionally intelligent pedagogical agent
No full textIn this paper, we present a serious role playing game that teaches STEM. Every role has been designed while keeping Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences and entry points in mind. From a technology point of view, the advances of our Serious Game are the way we use a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), as well as the use of Intelligent Pedagogical Agents (IPAs), which guides the learner trough the game. Players' emotions enter the loop performing sentiment analysis trough chat messages among team members and the IPA. From a pedagogical point of view, the main novelty is that the game follows an inquiry-based approach where the learner is encouraged to ask questions and create her own path to arrive to the solution of the assigned task. While in state-of-the-art games, the user usually interacts by choosing a sentence among a set of predefined possibilities, our system allows the user to freely express her thoughts in textual form and provides the user with an adequate answer. The role-playing game also offers the possibility to work in teams and develop meta competences such as adaptation and anticipation. © The Authors, 2016. All Rights Reserved
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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