Design and Evaluation of Animated Pedagogical Agents

Abstract

The area of animated pedagogical agents is related to the development of applications that aim to improve the human-computer interaction process using software agents represented by characters or human figures. Several projects are being developed in this area, and one of their concerns is the “illusion of life” effect. In order to reach the believability needed for promoting the “illusion of life,” it is important that researches be concerned with two main aspects during projects of animated pedagogical agents: the design aspect and the evaluation aspect. In this chapter, we will discuss basic guidelines for animated pedagogical agents design, and an evaluation method based on concepts provided by computer in education (CE), artificial intelligence (AI), and human-computer interaction (HCI), in order to help CE and AI researchers (to project and to develop pedagogical agents that can enhance human-agent usability) and HCI researchers and teachers (to evaluate these agents).