Improvising stories for pedagogical purposes
Bulling behaviour is a complex and often devastating problem occurring mostly among children in schools that can lead to dramatic and sometimes irreversible consequences. It is distinguished from other aggressive behaviour by its very repetitiveness and the imbalance in strength between the bully and the victim. VICTEC project aimed to develop a new approach to personal and social education and to allow children to explore the process of perspective-taking and reflection for dealing with bullying situations. The project's pedagogical objectives were met through involving the child in a virtual play using intelligent synthetic characters that can establish credible and empathic relations with the user. Part of this will entail seeing the social world through the eyes of somebody else and investigating different choices and actions. Rather than trying to build yet another synthetic character, project partners at the Herriot-Watt University developed a framework for the creation of virtual environments inhabited by empathic synthetic autonomous agents. The authoring tool has to configure different school buildings from a library of components and support the selection of characters and back story. It was therefore desirable to have a modular approach to the system architecture design as proper decomposition of graphical and artificial intelligence elements would simplify the system development and provide extensibility. Data storage, manipulation and display layers were clearly separated in an SQL database were the library content was held. The software has already been extensively evaluated with over a thousand children to consider childrens' engagement with the synthetic agents and their empathic responses to the characters and the scenarios but is still evolving. Developers are working on expanding the range of characters and episodes and improving the user interaction, which is limited by technology to speech or text.
