My-Pet-Our-Pet

My-Pet-Our-Pet (see the article by Chen et al., 2007-http://www.petpartners.org/document.doc?id=289-) is an animal companion system based on open learner models as animal companions. The learners are grouped into several teams, in which each learner is surrounded by two kinds of animal companions, an individual animal or My-Pet, and a team animal companion or Our-Pet. My-Pet encourages users to learn individually online subjects through nurturing the pet character. The repertoire of activities in the system consists of four modes: pet nurturing, individual learning, game competition and group discussion. In an experiment in a classroom of one elementary school in Taiwan, 31 students were motivated and engaged in the process of raising their pets, and most of them (29 students) increased effort to improve their learning. Open learner models as animal companions benefit student´s learning.