Pedagogical agents

Pedagogical agents are autonomous agents that support human learning, by interacting with students in the context of interactive learning environments. They extend and improve upon,previous work on intelligent tutoring systems in a number of ways. They adapt their behavior to the,dynamic state of the learning environment, taking advantage of learning opportunities as they arise. They can support collaborative learning as well as individualized learning, because multiple students and agents can interact in a shared environment. Given a suitably rich user interface, pedagogical agents are capable of a wide spectrum of instructionally effective interactions with students, including multimodal dialog. Animated pedagogical agents can promote student motivation and engagement, and engender affective as;well as cognitive responses. This paper surveys current research in pedagogical agents, and describes some current methods for investing agents with pedagogical capabilities.