Learning and Games

Part of the Volume on the Ecology of Games: Connecting Youth, Games, and Learning In this chapter, I argue that good video games recruit good learning and that a game's design is inherently connected to designing good learning for players. I start with a perspective on learning now common in the Learning Sciences that argues that people primarily think and learn through experiences they have had, not through abstract calculations and generalizations. People store these experiences in memory -- and human long-term memory is now viewed as nearly limitless -- and use them to run simulations in their minds to prepare for problem solving in new situations. These simulations help them to form hypotheses about how to proceed in the new situation based on past experiences. The chapter also discusses the conditions experience must meet if it is to be optimal for learning and shows how good video games can deliver such optimal learning experiences. Some of the issues covered include: identity and learning; models and model-based thinking; the control of avatars and "empathy for a complex system"; distributed intelligence and cross-functional teams for learning; motivation, and ownership; emotion in learning; and situated meaning, that is, the ways in which games represent verbal meaning through images, actions, and dialogue, not just other words and definitions

Designing friends

Embodied Conversational Agents are virtual humans that can interact with humans using verbal and non-verbal forms of communication. In most cases, they have been designed for short interactions. This paper asks the question how one would start to design synthetic characters that can become your friends. We look at insights from social psychology and propose a methodology for designing friends

Bringing tabletop technologies to kindergarten children

Taking computer technology away from the desktop and into a more physical, manipulative space, is known that provide many benefits and is generally considered to result in a system that is easier to learn and more natural to use. This paper describes a design solution that allows kindergarten children to take the benefits of the new pedagogical possibilities that tangible interaction and tabletop technologies offer for manipulative learning. After analysis of children's cognitive and psychomotor skills, we have designed and tuned a prototype game that is suitable for children aged 3 to 4 years old. Our prototype uniquely combines low cost tangible interaction and tabletop technology with tutored learning. The design has been based on the observation of children using the technology, letting them freely play with the application during three play sessions. These observational sessions informed the design decisions for the game whilst also confirming the children's enjoyment of the prototype

Controlling the Gaze of Conversational Agents

We report on a pilot experiment that investigated the effects of different eye gaze behaviours of a cartoon-like talking face on the quality of human-agent dialogues. We compared a version of the talking face that roughly implements some patterns of human-like behaviour with\ud two other versions. In one of the other versions the shifts in gaze were kept minimal and in the other version the shifts would occur randomly. The talking face has a number of restrictions. There is no speech recognition, so questions and replies have to be typed in by the users\ud of the systems. Despite this restriction we found that participants that conversed with the agent that behaved according to the human-like patterns appreciated the agent better than participants that conversed with the other agents. Conversations with the optimal version also\ud proceeded more efficiently. Participants needed less time to complete their task

Experimenting with the Gaze of a Conversational Agent

We have carried out a pilot experiment to investigate the effects of different eye gaze behaviors of a cartoon-like talking face on the quality of human-agent dialogues. We compared a version of the talking face that roughly implements some patterns of humanlike behavior with two other versions. We called this the optimal version. In one of the other versions the shifts in gaze were kept minimal and in the other version the shifts would occur randomly. The talking face has a number of restrictions. There is no speech recognition, so questions and replies have to\ud be typed in by the users of the systems. Despite this restriction we found that participants that conversed with the optimal agent appreciated the agent more than participants that conversed with the other agents. Conversations with the optimal version proceeded more efficiently. Participants needed less time to complete their task

An aesthetics of touch: investigating the language of design relating to form

How well can designers communicate qualities of touch? This paper presents evidence that they have some capability to do so, much of which appears to have been learned, but at present make limited use of such language. Interviews with graduate designer-makers suggest that they are aware of and value the importance of touch and materiality in their work, but lack a vocabulary to fully relate to their detailed explanations of other aspects such as their intent or selection of materials. We believe that more attention should be paid to the verbal dialogue that happens in the design process, particularly as other researchers show that even making-based learning also has a strong verbal element to it. However, verbal language alone does not appear to be adequate for a comprehensive language of touch. Graduate designers-makers’ descriptive practices combined non-verbal manipulation within verbal accounts. We thus argue that haptic vocabularies do not simply describe material qualities, but rather are situated competences that physically demonstrate the presence of haptic qualities. Such competencies are more important than groups of verbal vocabularies in isolation. Design support for developing and extending haptic competences must take this wide range of considerations into account to comprehensively improve designers’ capabilities

Meetings and Meeting Modeling in Smart Environments

In this paper we survey our research on smart meeting rooms and its relevance for augmented reality meeting support and virtual reality generation of meetings in real time or off-line. The research reported here forms part of the European 5th and 6th framework programme projects multi-modal meeting manager (M4) and augmented multi-party interaction (AMI). Both projects aim at building a smart meeting environment that is able to collect multimodal captures of the activities and discussions in a meeting room, with the aim to use this information as input to tools that allow real-time support, browsing, retrieval and summarization of meetings. Our aim is to research (semantic) representations of what takes place during meetings in order to allow generation, e.g. in virtual reality, of meeting activities (discussions, presentations, voting, etc.). Being able to do so also allows us to look at tools that provide support during a meeting and at tools that allow those not able to be physically present during a meeting to take part in a virtual way. This may lead to situations where the differences between real meeting participants, human-controlled virtual participants and (semi-) autonomous virtual participants disappear

Parameterized Action Representation and Natural Language Instructions for Dynamic Behavior Modification of Embodied Agents

We introduce a prototype for building a strategy game. A player can control and modify the behavior of all the characters in a game, and introduce new strategies, through the powerful medium of natural language instructions. We describe a Parameterized Action Representation (PAR) designed to bridge the gap between natural language instructions and the virtual agents who are to carry them out. We will illustrate PAR through an interactive demonstration of a multi-agent strategy game