Active Open Learner Models as Animal Companions: Motivating Children to Learn through Interacting with My-Pet and Our-Pet

Authors:
Zhi-Hong Chen;Chih-Yueh Chou;Yi-Chan Deng;Tak-Wai Chan
Affiliations:
Department of Computer Science & Information Engineering, National Central University, Taiwan. E-mail: hon@cl.ncu.edu.tw/ycdeng@cl.ncu.edu.tw;Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Yuan Ze University, Taiwan. E-mail: cychou@saturn.yzu.edu.tw;Department of Computer Science & Information Engineering, National Central University, Taiwan. E-mail: hon@cl.ncu.edu.tw/ycdeng@cl.ncu.edu.tw;Center for Science and Technology of Learning, Taiwan chan@cl.ncu.edu.tw
Venue:
International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education
Year:
2007

Citing 0
Cited 10

Authoring Educational Games with Greenmind

ITS '08 Proceedings of the 9th international conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems
Designing the game-based environment to facilitate learners' interaction in performance-based learning by virtual pets

CSCL'09 Proceedings of the 9th international conference on Computer supported collaborative learning - Volume 1
A Reconfigurable Architecture for Building Intelligent Learning Environments

Proceedings of the 2009 conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education: Building Learning Systems that Care: From Knowledge Representation to Affective Modelling
An overview of CSCL methodologies

ICLS '10 Proceedings of the 9th International Conference of the Learning Sciences - Volume 1
Towards Systems That Care: A Conceptual Framework based on Motivation, Metacognition and Affect

International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education
Open social student modeling: visualizing student models with parallel introspectiveviews

UMAP'11 Proceedings of the 19th international conference on User modeling, adaption, and personalization
QuizMap: open social student modeling and adaptive navigation support with TreeMaps

EC-TEL'11 Proceedings of the 6th European conference on Technology enhanced learning: towards ubiquitous learning
We care about you: Incorporating pet characteristics with educational agents through reciprocal caring approach

Computers & Education
Motivational social visualizations for personalized e-learning

EC-TEL'12 Proceedings of the 7th European conference on Technology Enhanced Learning
A surrogate competition approach to enhancing game-based learning

ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI)

Quantified Score

Hi-index	0.02

Visualization

Abstract

This pilot study reports how to portray open learner models as animal companions in order to motivate children to learn in the digital classroom environment. To meet two challenges of motivation and interactivity for open learner models, the concept of open learner models as animal companions is proposed based on the emotional attachment of humans towards pets. Animal companions adopt three strategies and play various educational roles to help children's learning in motivation, reflection and member interactions. A class of students is divided into several teams. A student keeps her own individual animal companion, called My-Pet, which holds the open learner model of the student, and each team has a team animal companion, called Our-Pet, which owns their open group learner model. A preliminary experiment is conducted in a fifth-grade class with 31 eleven year old students in an elementary school to collect initial feedback in cognitive and affective aspects.