Pedagogical agents and Artificial Intelligence

Pedagogical agents, that is, animated, life-like characters in a computer-based learning environment are attracting research in Education. Students learn lessons while interacting with agents designed to apply instructional protocols. In fact, learners can receive from the agent verbal messages tipically provided by humans. In a certain sense, a learner might be able to hold a connection with that agent, just as in a classroom. It is recommended that a pedagogical agent look human-like looking for a peer-to-peer interaction over teacher-to-learner interaction. The value of interaction with equally able peers generates the cooperation of equal partners fostering thinking, intellectual development and even affect. By this, researchers have attempted to simulate this interaction in tutoring systems. For instance, Biswas and colaborators at the Vanderbild University with the project Betty´s brain. Betty is a kind of anthropomorphized learning companion building social relations with the student. A pedagogical agent is not a conventional computer-based approach. Traditional human-computer interaction approaches haven´t studied how to support social interaction. Antropomorphized learning companions are just the possibility for such that exploration. It is obvious that the social interaction with the teachers and the learner´s perception of them play an important role in influencing the motivation and the learner´s efficacy. So the social interaction with learning companions in computer-based environments.