Pedagogical Agents Trying on a Caring Mentor Role

We describe the design and evaluation of an affective pedagogical agent persona for Intelligent Tutoring Systems. The goal of our research was to develop an agent embodying a persona of a caring mentor interested in the learner's progress. The agent's behaviour is guided by a set of rules that are triggered by the states of the session history. Four agents were integrated with EER-Tutor for a formative evaluation study. The mentor persona secured strong rapport with the users; the audible narration was seen as a strong feature of the agents.

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