Proagents - site visit 2

Wireless Technology and Psychophysiological Computing (Wireless User Interfaces)Proactive Agents Supporting Children's Exploratory Learning, a joint project between the Department of Teacher Education and the Department of Computer and Information Sciences at the University of Tampereand Tampere University of Technology.

Site visit in Tampere on 27 November May 2004 

The project studies proactive intelligent agents for teaching pre-school and elementary school children. Especially, the project tries to implement agents for modelling conceptual learning and thinking. The subjects studied are both normally seeing and visually impaired children. The agents support children's spontaneous explorations in a computer-based simulation program. The agents, e.g., activate the children's inquiring in the programby asking questions, encouraging children's own questioning and hypotheses formation and by givingfeedback. The applied multimodal interface technology means that the feedbacks may be visual or auditory or even haptic, i.e., the sense of touch is also being used as one feedback channel. The primary goal is to create a learning environment that can be used by both visually impaired and normally seeing children. The system is proactive in the sense that the agents try to anticipate the questions of the children and guide them towards scientific inquiry and knowledge construction at this subject domain.

A child may choose between several microworlds to explore. At present, children may explore the solar system, but also other domains such as the surface of the earth, the interior layers of the earth, the atmosphere and the relation between the earth and the sun will be made available later. For each microworld, a companion agent, e.g., an astronaut, will guide the child in exploring the world. The companion agent accentuates different objects, events, properties and relationships in the world. The companion agent also asks questions and makessuggestions. The agents scaffold each child with respect to his/her capabilities and exploration paths and guide the explorations from familiar everyday contexts towards the causes and explanations of the phenomena.

The agent architecture allows for different teaching strategies to be included. This project will, however, concentrate on exploratory learning, where children's interests and concepts are used as a starting point, and the companion agents further guide the children through the microworlds. At the same time, the project tries to find out what kind of conceptual models the children build of the domains when using such an agent-supported environment. The multimodal features are also expected to affect this conceptual modelling. A hypothesis is that it would be easier (or at least different) to teach about, for example, the concept of earth's gravity by using a haptic interface.

Technically speaking, the system consists of a controller in C++ that provides the interfaces for playing sound and force-feedback effects, while static and microworld specific activities (e.g., rotating and moving objects) have been implemented in Python. Also Java may be used in the future. VRML has been used for modelling the microworlds. A Phantom haptic display has been integrated into the system. For providing speech output, both human actors and a synthesizer are used.

The first pilot tests with the system have been performed. For example, the scripts of the companion agents were read to 10 children (aged between 5 -9 years) and after that children were asked to comment these scripts: how they liked it, how the agents' narrations could be improved etc. The pilot system has also been used by together 13 visually impaired childrenat the school for visually impaired children and at the testing laboratory. Children's first comments seem both positive and constructive, suggesting how both the content and the physical system could be enhanced.

The project will continue by developing the system further, including more microworlds and more diversified agent activity. Testing with more children will also be performed. These tests include interviews with the children before and after they have used the system to find out what kind of conceptual models they have about the domain, analysing the routes they follow in the system and how they possibly interact with other children or adults while using the system.  The project will also analyse the user profiles of the children and their ability to use independent vs. self-directed learning.

Some recent publications, posters and abstracts related to the project are

• Tuominen, E. Proactive Agents Supporting Children's Exploratory Learning. Poster presented at Jure pre-conference, Earli (European Association for Research on Learning and Instruction). Padova, Italy, August 25-26, 2003.
• Tuominen, E. A visually impaired child, proactive agents and conceptual learning. Poster presented at the 13th Annual Conference on Quality in Early Childhood, EECERA, Glasgow, Scotland, September 3-6, 2003.
• Tuominen, E. & Peltola, K. Proactive agents and children's conceptual learning. Earli's 4th European Symposium on Conceptual Change, Delphi, Greece, May 19-22, 2004.
• Kangassalo, M., Raisamo, R., Hietala, P., Järvi, J., Peltola, K., Saarinen, R., Tuominen, E., Hippula, A. Proactive Agents That Support Children's Exploratory Learning. Proceedings of the 14th European-Japanese Conference on Information Modelling and Knowledge Bases, Skövde University, Sweden, June 1 - June 4, 2004, 8 pages.
• Tuominen, E. 2003. A visually impaired child, proactive agents and conceptual learning. 13th Annual Conference on Quality in Early Childhood, Abstracts Conference Proceedings EECERA, Glasgow, Scotland. (Conference abstract.)

More information

For further information, please contact the coordinator of the joint project, Assistant Professor Marjatta Kangassalo at the University of Tampere, or the other researchers involved. See also the web page of the project at http://www.uta.fi/proact/

 Project partners:

• University of Tampere, Department of Teacher Education, Early Childhood 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, Researchers Rami Saarinen, Janne Järvi, Jouni Salo
• Lecturer Lic. Phil. Pentti Hietala and Engineer Arto Hippula in the steering group.