Virtual Tutor Application v1.0Ruth AgadaDr. Jie YanBowie State UniversityComputer Science Department

Background•Animated agents have many uses.

▫in educational, training, and simulation environments, HLS, virtual simulation for dismounted soldiers, etc

▫and in entertainment applications. Second life, Sims, etc

• impression of realism.

Background cont’d•Examples:

▫Virtual Sign Animated Pedagogical Agents Designed for deaf and hearing impaired people. Presents sign demonstrations via a series of 3-D graphical

animations.▫Language learning Animated Pedagogical Agents

Designed to teach children to read monitors each student’s performance continuously and

adapts the study plan Capable of providing feedback to students

Introduction•Studies have shown that effective individual tutoring

is the most powerful mode of teaching. ▫Logically and financially unfeasible.

•Animated pedagogical agents offer enormous promise for interactive learning environments.

•Despite the progress, much remains to be done.

Introduction cont’d•Research objective

▫To design, develop and implement a virtual tutor To develop a powerful new approach for investigating

engaging and effective communication To develop an environment for supplemental learning

purposes. Create realistic 3D animated model to be used as virtual

tutor

Approach• Interface design

▫The interface consists of three main parts: an overview window. the agent window. the content explanation window.

▫Quiz interface components: Question and answer area Agent window Report window

▫Audio and phoneme files generated using tts Will be changed to a human voice

Approach cont’d•Generating audio and phoneme files

▫Use avatar-CUAnimate toolkit Using the text-to-speech component

▫Tts file – 2 separate files Simple .wav file Phoneme .txt file

Avatar- CUAnimate toolkit

Lecture screenshot

Lecture screenshot with illustration

Quiz Screenshot

Other models

Are just a few of the models

Evaluation•Preliminary testing of Agent

▫Tested on Bowie State University students.▫Observing subject’s perception.▫To assess student:

12 survey questions on a 5 point Likert scale. Rated with a score range 1 – 5.

Sample Questionnaire

1.0

1.5

2.0

2.5

3.0

3.5

4.0

4.5

5.0

5.5

Ave

rage

Sco

re

Subject Test Results Comparisons

No Emotions, No Head Movements

No Emotions, Head Movements

Emotions, Head Movements

Conclusion & future work•Virtual Tutor can be used to supplement/teach lecture

materials.▫Students will then be able to view the prepared lectures

•Preliminary testing proved hypotheses.•New features will be added to application

▫More modules developed ▫Watch instructional videos▫User can keep track of grades

•Make available online.

Acknowledgements Thanks to:

Dr. Yan .Department of Computer science.Research made possible through grants from:NSF: SGER:  Research to Improve Communication by Pedagogical Agents (Award No. IIS-0827188).