Site visit in Tampere on 13 May 2003

The coordination unit made a site visit at TAUCHI at the University of Tampere on 13 May 2003. Assistant Professor Marjatta Kangassalo and Professor Roope Raisamo together with their research groups presented their project Proactive Agents Supporting Children's Exploratory Learning.

The project aims at developing a proactive tutoring system to help with children's conceptual learning and develop their thinking. The focus group consists of pre-school and elementary school children (aged 6-10). The selected application concerns exploratory learning about natural phenomena (the globe, the solar system, etc.). The goal is to develop a system that is suitable for both normal and visually impaired children.

Central themes of the project are exploratory learning, learning confidence, proactive agents and multimodal interfaces.

In exploratory learning, the children's own questions, interests and concepts are used as a starting point. Proactive agents will guide the children to anticipating questions and suggestions. They will also give them courage to ask new questions themselves and deepen their understanding of the phenomena they are learning about.

The background of the children is very varied. Studies show that learning confidence (i.e. the belief in oneself to be able to learn anything) in adults predicts a many-sided and non-problematic human-computer relation. The project will explore and assess learning confidence for children as well. Different grades of learning confidence are expected to influence the usage profiles of the human-computer relationships.

The proactive agents will have inferencing and learning capabilities that enable them to produce proactive behaviour, i.e., to suggest interesting or important information at appropriate times in the learning process. The natural way of agent feedback is through speech synthesis, but haptic presentation will be used to support the visual or auditive presentations with tactile and force feedback.

The selected application in the first phase is the world and the solar system. Children learn about the earth, continents and seas, as well as the planets of the solar systems. As a testing environment, the group uses a Reachin display system consisting of the Phantom haptic display, stereo glasses, and a rack-mounted monitor.

The results of the project include a tutoring system for children applying proactive agents and knowledge on how proactive agents can be used in tutoring systems. The project will also have knowledge on children's exploratory and collaborative learning and thinking in novel technological learning environments representing natural science and their developmental process of learning confidence in use of information technology.

More information
For more information, please contact the coordinator of the project, Assistant Professor Marjatta Kangassalo at the University of Tampere or the other researchers involved. See also the project's web page or the project's web page at this site.

The research consortium consists of the following units:

• University of Tampere, Department of Teacher Education:
• Assistant Professor Marjatta Kangassalo, PhD students Kari Peltola, Eva Tuominen
• University of Tampere, Department of Computer and Information Sciences, Tampere Unit for Human-Computer Interaction (TAUCHI):
• Professor Roope Raisamo, Lecturer Lic. Phil. Pentti Hietala, Researchers Rami Saarinen, Janne Järvi

Greger Lindén
Programme Coordinator
Greger.Linden@cs.helsinki.fi