231,465 research outputs found

    Player agency in interactive narrative: audience, actor & author

    Get PDF
    The question motivating this review paper is, how can computer-based interactive narrative be used as a constructivist learn- ing activity? The paper proposes that player agency can be used to link interactive narrative to learner agency in constructivist theory, and to classify approaches to interactive narrative. The traditional question driving research in interactive narrative is, ‘how can an in- teractive narrative deal with a high degree of player agency, while maintaining a coherent and well-formed narrative?’ This question derives from an Aristotelian approach to interactive narrative that, as the question shows, is inherently antagonistic to player agency. Within this approach, player agency must be restricted and manip- ulated to maintain the narrative. Two alternative approaches based on Brecht’s Epic Theatre and Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed are reviewed. If a Boalian approach to interactive narrative is taken the conflict between narrative and player agency dissolves. The question that emerges from this approach is quite different from the traditional question above, and presents a more useful approach to applying in- teractive narrative as a constructivist learning activity

    Report on the Information Retrieval Festival (IRFest2017)

    Get PDF
    The Information Retrieval Festival took place in April 2017 in Glasgow. The focus of the workshop was to bring together IR researchers from the various Scottish universities and beyond in order to facilitate more awareness, increased interaction and reflection on the status of the field and its future. The program included an industry session, research talks, demos and posters as well as two keynotes. The first keynote was delivered by Prof. Jaana Kekalenien, who provided a historical, critical reflection of realism in Interactive Information Retrieval Experimentation, while the second keynote was delivered by Prof. Maarten de Rijke, who argued for more Artificial Intelligence usage in IR solutions and deployments. The workshop was followed by a "Tour de Scotland" where delegates were taken from Glasgow to Aberdeen for the European Conference in Information Retrieval (ECIR 2017

    Towards Learning ‘Self’ and Emotional Knowledge in Social and Cultural Human-Agent Interactions

    Get PDF
    Original article can be found at: http://www.igi-global.com/articles/details.asp?ID=35052 Copyright IGI. Posted by permission of the publisher.This article presents research towards the development of a virtual learning environment (VLE) inhabited by intelligent virtual agents (IVAs) and modeling a scenario of inter-cultural interactions. The ultimate aim of this VLE is to allow users to reflect upon and learn about intercultural communication and collaboration. Rather than predefining the interactions among the virtual agents and scripting the possible interactions afforded by this environment, we pursue a bottomup approach whereby inter-cultural communication emerges from interactions with and among autonomous agents and the user(s). The intelligent virtual agents that are inhabiting this environment are expected to be able to broaden their knowledge about the world and other agents, which may be of different cultural backgrounds, through interactions. This work is part of a collaborative effort within a European research project called eCIRCUS. Specifically, this article focuses on our continuing research concerned with emotional knowledge learning in autobiographic social agents.Peer reviewe

    Fostering the reduction of assortative mixing or homophily into the class

    Get PDF
    Human societies from the outset have been associated according to race, beliefs, religion, social level, and the like. These behaviors continue even today in the classroom at primary, middle, and superior levels. However, the growth of ICT offers educational researchers new ways to explore methods of team formation that have been proven to be efficient in the field of serious games through the use of computer networks. The selection process of team members in serious games through the use of computer networks is carried out according to their performance in the area of the game without distinction of social variables. The use of serious games in education has been discussed in multiple research studies which state that its application in teaching and learning processes are changing the way of teaching. This article presents an exploratory analysis of the team formation process based on collaboration through the use of ICT tools of collective intelligence called TBT (The best team). The process and its ICT tool combine the paradigms of creativity in swarming, collective intelligence, serious games, and social computing in order to capture the participants’ emotions and evaluate contributions. Based on the results, we consider that the use of new forms of teaching and learning based on the emerging paradigms is necessary. Therefore, TBT is a tool that could become an effective way to encourage the formation of work groups by evaluating objective variable of performance of its members in collaborative works.Postprint (published version

    Culture and Cognitive Theory: Toward a Reformulation

    Get PDF
    In a provocative and important recent article Anthony Marsella (1998) makes an eloquent plea for the forging of a new metadiscipline of psychology that he labels global-community psychology. Marsella argues that we need a radical rethinking of the fundamental premises of psychology, rooted as they are in Western cultural traditions. Features of an emergent global-community psychology include an emphasis on multicultural and multidisciplinary approaches to human behavior that draw attention to the importance of context and meaning in human lives. Marsella's call for a global-community psychology reflects, in part, a growing body of literature that demonstrates the importance of cultural factors in a diver-sity of psychological domains such as cognition, emotion, social behavior, and psychopathology

    Designing Engaging Learning Experiences in Programming

    Get PDF
    In this paper we describe work to investigate the creation of engaging programming learning experiences. Background research informed the design of four fieldwork studies to explore how programming tasks could be framed to motivate learners. Our empirical findings from these four field studies are summarized here, with a particular focus upon one – Whack a Mole – which compared the use of a physical interface with the use of a screen-based equivalent interface to obtain insights into what made for an engaging learning experience. Emotions reported by two sets of participant undergraduate students were analyzed, identifying the links between the emotions experienced during programming and their origin. Evidence was collected of the very positive emotions experienced by learners programming with a physical interface (Arduino) in comparison with a similar program developed using a screen-based equivalent interface. A follow-up study provided further evidence of the motivation of personalized design of programming tangible physical artefacts. Collating all the evidence led to the design of a set of ‘Learning Dimensions’ which may provide educators with insights to support key design decisions for the creation of engaging programming learning experiences

    Investigating Emotions in Creative Design

    Get PDF
    A wealth of research has suggested that emotions play a significant role in the creative problem solving process, but less work has focused on investigating the role of emotions in the design process. This is surprising given that creative problem solving lies at the heart of the design processes. In an exploratory study we interviewed 9 expert designers about their emotions during the design process. The content analysis allowed us to identify the various types of emotions relevant in the design process and to extend Wallas’ model of creative problem solving with emotional components for each of its stages. In addition, we identified two important roles of emotions in design and several ways in which expert designers regulate their emotions. We discussed the theoretical and practical applications of our work

    From individual characters to large crowds: augmenting the believability of open-world games through exploring social emotion in pedestrian groups

    Get PDF
    Crowds of non-player characters improve the game-play experiences of open-world video-games. Grouping is a common phenomenon of crowds and plays an important role in crowd behaviour. Recent crowd simulation research focuses on group modelling in pedestrian crowds and game-designers have argued that the design of non-player characters should capture and exploit the relationship between characters. The concepts of social groups and inter-character relationships are not new in social psychology, and on-going work addresses the social life of emotions and its behavioural consequences on individuals and groups alike. The aim of this paper is to provide an overview of current research in social psychology, and to use the findings as a source of inspiration to design a social network of non-player characters, with application to the problem of group modelling in simulated crowds in computer games

    Agents for educational games and simulations

    Get PDF
    This book consists mainly of revised papers that were presented at the Agents for Educational Games and Simulation (AEGS) workshop held on May 2, 2011, as part of the Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems (AAMAS) conference in Taipei, Taiwan. The 12 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from various submissions. The papers are organized topical sections on middleware applications, dialogues and learning, adaption and convergence, and agent applications
    • 

    corecore