Proactive agents to assist multimodal explorative learning of astronomical phenomena

Authors:
Eva Tuominen;Marjatta Kangassalo;Pentti Hietala;Roope Raisamo;Kari Peltola
Affiliations:
Unit for Early Childhood Education, Department of Teacher Education, University of Tampere, Tampere, Finland;Unit for Early Childhood Education, Department of Teacher Education, University of Tampere, Tampere, Finland;Tampere Unit for Computer-Human Interaction TAUCHI, Department of Computer Sciences, University of Tampere, Tampere, Finland;Tampere Unit for Computer-Human Interaction TAUCHI, Department of Computer Sciences, University of Tampere, Tampere, Finland;Academic Development Unit, University of Tampere, Tampere, Finland
Venue:
Advances in Human-Computer Interaction - Special issue on interactive play and learning for children
Year:
2008

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Abstract

This paper focuses on developing, testing, and examining the Proagents multimodal learning environment to support blind children's explorative learning in the area of astronomy. We utilize haptic, auditive, and visual interaction. Haptic and auditory feedbacks make the system accessible to blind children. The system is used as an exploration tool for children's spontaneous and question-driven explorations. High-level interaction and play are essential with environments for young children. Proactive agents support and guide children to deepen their explorations and discover the central concepts and relations in phenomena. It has been challenging to integrate together in a pedagogically relevant way the explorative learning approach, proactive agents' actions, haptic perception's possibilities, and the selected astronomical phenomena. Our tests have shown that children are very interested in using the system and the operations of the agents.