Character Education using Pedagogical Agents and Socratic Voice

Promoting ethical, responsible, and caring young people is a perennial aim of education. Schools are invited to include moral teaching in every possible curriculum, such as the core subjects and sports teams and clubs. Efforts have been done to find other teaching ways other than traditional ones such as games or role play or engaging students in moral dilemmas. Computer games have been always found as one of the most engaging learning platforms. This paper introduces AEINS, a learning environment that is designed and implemented based on the learning theories such as: Bloom’s Taxonomy, Keller’s ARCS model and Gagné’s Nine Principles. The learning environment allows the students to interact with different moral dilemmas and see the effect of their choices on themselves and others. AEINS makes use of the Socratic Method as its predominant teaching pedagogy and employs pedagogical agents to supply the educational process. AEINS evaluation results indicated development of moral reasoning and transfer of moral virtues to its users

AEINS: Interactive Narrative Role in Fostering Character Education

Promoting ethical, responsible, and caring young people is a perennial aim of education. Efforts have been done to find other teaching ways other than traditional ones such as games and role play. Narrative-based computer games have found their way as engaging learning platforms that allow collaboration of humans and computers in the creation of innovative experiences. In this paper, we focus on the design of an adaptive, interactive narrative model that makes use of a student model to provide an individualized story-path and an individualized learning process. In other words, we aim to have strong learning objectives underpinned by effective story telling. The adaptive narrative model has been deployed in the educational game environment, AEINS, along with the use of the Socratic Method and pedagogical agents to help teaching in the ethics domain. Evaluation results indicate the usefulness of the design and provide evidence on the development of moral reasoning and the transfer of moral virtues to its users

Modelling human teaching tactics and strategies for tutoring systems

One of the promises of ITSs and ILEs is that they will teach and assist learning in an intelligent manner. Historically this has tended to mean concentrating on the interface, on the representation of the domain and on the representation of the student’s knowledge. So systems have attempted to provide students with reifications both of what is to be learned and of the learning process, as well as optimally sequencing and adjusting activities, problems and feedback to best help them learn that domain. We now have embodied (and disembodied) teaching agents and computer-based peers, and the field demonstrates a much greater interest in metacognition and in collaborative activities and tools to support that collaboration. Nevertheless the issue of the teaching competence of ITSs and ILEs is still important, as well as the more specific question as to whether systems can and should mimic human teachers. Indeed increasing interest in embodied agents has thrown the spotlight back on how such agents should behave with respect to learners. In the mid 1980s Ohlsson and others offered critiques of ITSs and ILEs in terms of the limited range and adaptability of their teaching actions as compared to the wealth of tactics and strategies employed by human expert teachers. So are we in any better position in modelling teaching than we were in the 80s? Are these criticisms still as valid today as they were then? This paper reviews progress in understanding certain aspects of human expert teaching and in developing tutoring systems that implement those human teaching strategies and tactics. It concentrates particularly on how systems have dealt with student answers and how they have dealt with motivational issues, referring particularly to work carried out at Sussex: for example, on responding effectively to the student’s motivational state, on contingent and Vygotskian inspired teaching strategies and on the plausibility problem. This latter is concerned with whether tactics that are effectively applied by human teachers can be as effective when embodied in machine teachers

Innovative integrated architecture for educational games: Challenges and merits

Interactive Narrative in game environments acts as the main catalyst to provide a motivating learning experience. In previous work, we have described how the use of a dual narrative generation technique could help to resolve the conflict between allowing high player student agency and also the track of the learning process. In this paper, we define a novel architecture that assists the dual narrative generation technique to be employed effectively in an adaptive educational game environment. The architecture composes components that individually have shown effectiveness in educational games environments. These components are graph structured narrative, dynamically generated narrative, evolving agents and a student model. An adaptive educational game, AEINS, has been developed to investigate the synergy of the architecture components. AEINS aims to foster character education at 8-12 year old children through the use of various interactive moral dilemmas that attempt the different student\u27s cognitive levels. AEINS was evaluated through a study involved 20 participants who interacted with AEINS on an individual basis

Interactive Narrative for Adaptive Educational Games: Architecture and an Application to Character Education

This thesis presents AEINS, Adaptive Educational Interactive Narrative System, that supports teaching ethics for 8-12 year old children. AEINS is designed based on Keller's and Gagné's learning theories. The idea is centered around involving students in moral dilemmas (called teaching moments) within which the Socratic Method is used as the teaching pedagogy. The important unique aspect of AEINS is that it exhibits the presence of four features shown to individually increase effectiveness of edugames environments, yet not integrated together in past research: a student model, a dynamic generated narrative, scripted branched narrative and evolving non-player characters. The student model aims to provide adaptation. The dynamic generated narrative forms a continuous story that glues the scripted teaching moments together. The evolving agents increase the realism and believability of the environment and perform a recognized pedagogical role by helping in supplying the educational process. AEINS has been evaluated intrinsically and empirically according to the following themes: architecture and implementation, social aspects, and educational achievements. The intrinsic evaluation checked the implicit goals embodied by the design aspects and made a value judgment about these goals. In the empirical evaluation, twenty participants were assigned to use AEINS over a number of games. The evaluation showed positive results as the participants appreciated the social characteristics of the system as they were able to recognize the genuine social aspects and the realism represented in the game. Finally, the evaluation showed indications for developing new lines of thinking for some participants to the extent that some of them were ready to carry the experience forward to the real world. However, the evaluation also suggested possible improvements, such as the use of 3D interface and free text natural language

Serious Games to Teach Ethics

In this paper, we are focusing on digital serious games (edugames) and how they can be utilized in teaching in the ethics and citizenship domain. Our aim is to combine narrative techniques with intelligent tutoring techniques in a single model that adopts and based on educational theories and classroom educational strategies. The model has been used to implement an adaptive educational interactive narrative system (AEINS). AEINS is an inquiry based edugame to support teaching ethics. The AEINS version presented in this paper targets students between the age of 8 and 11. The idea is centered around presenting and involving students in different moral dilemmas (called teaching moments) within which the Socratic Method is the used pedagogy in the teaching process. AEINS monitors and analyzes the students actions in order to provide an individualized story-path and an individualized learning process. The student is an active participant in the educational process and is able to interact with the edugame as a first person player. We claim that such interaction can help in developing new or deeper thoughts about different moral situations. Our aim is to contribute to the design of serious games and help raise awareness of ethics and citizenship in children

Discourses of Educational Rights in Philosophy for Children: On the Theoretical and Practical Merits of Philosophical Education for Children

This article aims to put into dialogue Philosophy for Children (P4C) and education rights. Whereas rights have robust conceptualizations and have been the topic of many scholarly discussions, scholarship on P4C still has a lot to unpack for a more expansive understanding, especially when scaled up to the level of rights. This work asks whether or not the rhetoric of “rights” can be used to discuss if P4C has a rightful place to be a mandatory part of school curriculum. Thus the article explores how P4C is positioned between children education and rights discourses. The range of views on P4C is broad enough to prevent the concentration of discursive power in a single source or authority in terms of scale of discussion. P4C is therefore subject to both scrutiny and praise in the same way that other human rights ideologies have been. In conclusion, this work hopes to speak and contribute to the literature on P4C by problematizing children’s discursive positions as learners and citizens with rights

The Enterprise of Socratic Metaethics

That human beings have the potential for rationality and the ability to cultivate it is a fact of human nature. But to value rationality and its subsidiary character dispositions - impartiality, intellectual discrimination, foresight, deliberation, prudence, self-reflection, self-control - is another matter entirely. I am going to take it as a given that if a person's freedom to act on her impulses and gratify her desires is constrained by the existence of others' equal, or more powerful, conflicting impulses and desires, then she will need the character dispositions of rationality to survive. The more circumscribed one's freedom and power, the more essential to survival and flourishing the character dispositions of rationality and the spirit may become

Teacher as “Team Player”: An Early Career Teacher’s Refinement of Critical Pedagogical Discourses

This study centers on one early-career English language arts (ELA) teacher’s development of his critical pedagogical discourses (CPD) within the contextual discourses of collaboration and data informed instruction. These contextual discourses circulated assumptions of teaching and learning that are privileged by the political ideologies of the neo-liberal agenda, which can erode the democratic purposes of education. Data is drawn from an eight-month interpretive qualitative case study that included classroom observations and semi-structured interviews. The two research objectives for this study included: to come to understand the range of ways an early-career ELA teacher navigated the tensions between his belief and the contextual discourses of teaching and learning and to complicate the role of the teacher’s CPD of student-centered learning in filtering the contextual discourses for pedagogical affiliation in a community of practice. Discourse data analysis indicated that the CPD simultaneously filtered and was refined through the filtering process, which informed the teacher’s membership across teaching contexts, compartmentalized monologic and dialogic practices within and across teaching units, and provided him the opportunity to realign his beliefs and practices through reflection on the use of dialogic tools in an instructional unit and the vision he had for himself and his students. This study suggests that teacher education and professional learning needs to purposefully provide dialogic spaces for teacher candidates and teachers to inquire into how their practice aligns with their beliefs and curricular visions of themselves as teachers and their students as learners and citizens. This study indicated that there is a need for future studies to address how pedagogical tools influence teachers’ curricular visions of their teaching and the pedagogical reasonings of their past, present, and future teaching