Pedagogical agents on the Web

Abstract

Animated pedagogical agents are lifelike animated characters that facilitate the learning process. This paper describes Adele, a pedagogical agent that is designed to work with Web-based educational simulations. The Adele architecture implements key pedagogical functions: presentation, student monitoring and feedback, probing questions, hints, and explanations. These capabilities are coupled with an animated persona that supports continuous multi-modal interaction with a student. The architecture supports client-side execution in a Web browser environment, and is able to inter-operate with simulations created by off-the-shelf authoring tools.