Narrative-centered tutorial planning for inquiry-based learning environments

Recent years have seen growing interest in narrative-centered learning environments. Leveraging the inherent structure of narrative, narrative-centered learning environments offer significant potential for inquiry-based learning in which students actively participate in engaging story-based problem-solving. A key challenge posed by narrative-centered learning is orchestrating all of the events in the unfolding story to motivate students and promote effective learning. In this paper we present a narrative-centered tutorial planning architecture that integrates narrative planning and pedagogical control. The architecture continually constructs and updates narrative plans to support the hypothesis-generation-testing cycles that form the basis for inquiry-based learning. It is being used to implement a prototype narrative-centered inquiry-based learning environment for the domain of microbiology. The planner dynamically balances narrative and pedagogical goals while at the same time satisfying the real-time constraints of highly interactive learning environments.