Persuasive teachable agent in pedagogical game

Abstract

A Persuasive Teachable Agent (PTA) is a special type of Teachable Agent which incorporates a persuasion theory in order to provide persuasive and more personalized feedback to the student. By employing the persuasion techniques, the PTA seeks to maintain the student in a high motivation and high ability state in which he or she has higher cognitive ability and his or her changes in attitudes are more persistent. However, the existing model of the PTA still has a few limitations. Firstly, the existing PTA model focuses on modelling the PTA’s ability to persuade, while does not model its ability to be taught by the student and to practice the knowledge it has learnt. Secondly, the quantitative model for computational processes in the PTA has low reusability. Thirdly, there is still a gap between theoretical models and practical implementation of the PTA. To address these three limitations, this project proposes an improved agent model which follows a goal-oriented approach and models the PTA in its totality by integrating the Persuasion Reasoning of the PTA with the Teachability Reasoning and the Practicability Reasoning. The project also proposes a more abstract and generalized quantitative model for the computations in the PTA. With higher level of abstraction, the reusability of the quantitative model is also improved. New system architecture is introduced to bridge the gap between theoretical models and implementation of the PTA. An instance of the PTA is also implemented and embedded into a 3D pedagogical game called VS Saga to demonstrate the practice of instantiating a PTA from the proposed agent model and system architecture. A focus group study has been conduct to assess the PTA qualitatively. The results of the focus group study are quite positive, showing the PTA has the ability to motivate and engage the student by generating personalized feedback and the potential to help the student develop positive attitudes towards learning. Positive feedback has also been received for the completeness of the new agent model and the reusability of the proposed system architecture. As for future studies, quantitative assessment of the PTA still needs to be carried out in order to analyze the effectiveness of the PTA statistically. The PTA also needs to build up its flexibility to cater to different learning topics.