USING THEATRICAL CONCEPTS FOR ROLE-PLAYS WITH EDUCATIONAL AGENTS

ABSTRACT Role-plays with educational agents allow to embed information and educational goals into a narrative context. These agents do not only have to come across as believable and lifelike, they also have to embody the pedagogical principles and educational goals of the application domain. In this paper, we argue that theatrical concepts, namely concepts derived from improvisational theater and meta-theater, can guide the design of educational agents. We illustrate this by presenting two systems: Puppet provides young children with improvisational agents to promote early learning through educational role-plays and CrossTalk uses interactive performances with virtual actors to demonstrate the basic principles that govern automatic dialogue generation. For both systems, we show how the theatrical concepts support a systematic approach to character design, behavior modeling, and user interaction and how they help to increase the believability and lifelikeness of our characters in an educational context.

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