H. Chad Lane
Research Scientist & Director for Learning Sciences Research
USC Institute for Creative Technologies
Adjunct Assistant Professor of Education
USC Rossier School of Education
Abstract
Students strongly prefer enthusiastic and passionate teachers. In addition, research has shown that students in the classrooms of enthusiastic teachers are more engaged, both with the content as well as classroom activities. What if our pedagogical agents were similarly excited to see you? What if they demonstrated passion for the content and for student learning? In this talk I will discuss our experiences in building the virtual human twins Ada and Grace, who answer general questions about themselves and technology, as well as Coach Mike, a pedagogical agent that teaches basic programming skills at an exhibit known as “Robot Park”. These characters seek not only to convey knowledge, but also to entertain visitors and increase engagement through humor, animation, and speech. Fundamentally, they were designed with the intention of being role models for young learners. I will provide a summary of the results of a large-scale evaluation and our lessons learned from deployment. I will end by speculating on the role of emotions in the decision processes of museum visitors and discuss our interest in conducting future work that both detects emotions and adjusts virtual human behaviors to increase engagement.
Bio
Chad is a Research Scientist and the Director for Learning Sciences Research at the University of Southern California’s Institute for Creative Technologies. He specializes in the application of artificial intelligence techniques to educational problems, with a focus on entertainment technologies and intelligent tutoring systems. This work involves interdisciplinary collaborations and addresses a variety of target domains, including social and intercultural skill development, informal science education, and complex problem solving skills. Prior to arriving at ICT, Chad was a graduate student at the University of Pittsburgh in the Learning Research and Development Center (LRDC) where he received his PhD in Computer Science in 2004.