| Title | Towards Virtual Agents for Supporting Appropriate Small Group Behaviors in Educational Contexts |
| Publication Type | Conference Paper |
| Year of Publication | 2019 |
| Authors | Zojaji, Sahba, Peters, Christopher |
| Conference Name | 2019 11th International Conference on Virtual Worlds and Games for Serious Applications (VS-Games) |
| Keywords | Collaboration, collaborative social situations, computer aided instruction, Demonstration Games, educational contexts, Games, human factors, information and communication technology, information and communications technology, nonverbal behaviors, Politeness, pubcrawl, Scalability, serious games (computing), small group behaviors, Small Groups, Social & Emotional Learning, Social Agents, social and emotional learning, software agents, Task Analysis, teaching, Training, verbal behaviors, virtual agents, virtual characters, virtual reality, virtual social demonstration games |
| Abstract | Verbal and non-verbal behaviors that we use in order to effectively communicate with other people are vital for our success in our daily lives. Despite the importance of social skills, creating standardized methods for training them and supporting their training is challenging. Information and Communications Technology (ICT) may have a good potential to support social and emotional learning (SEL) through virtual social demonstration games. This paper presents initial work involving the design of a pedagogical scenario to facilitate teaching of socially appropriate and inappropriate behaviors when entering and standing in a small group of people, a common occurrence in collaborative social situations. This is achieved through the use of virtual characters and, initially, virtual reality (VR) environments for supporting situated learning in multiple contexts. We describe work done thus far on the demonstrator scenario and anticipated potentials, pitfalls and challenges involved in the approach. |
| DOI | 10.1109/VS-Games.2019.8864528 |
| Citation Key | zojaji_towards_2019 |
Towards Virtual Agents for Supporting Appropriate Small Group Behaviors in Educational Contexts