Virtual Tutor Application v1.0 Ruth Agada Dr. Jie Yan Bowie State University Computer Science Department

Background Animated agents have many uses. ▫ in educational, training, and simulation environments,  HLS, virtual simulation for dismounted soldiers, etc ▫ and in entertainment applications.  Second life, Sims, etc impression of realism.

Background cont’d Examples: ▫ Virtual Sign Animated Pedagogical Agents  Designed for deaf and hearing impaired people.  Presents sign demonstrations via a series of 3-D graphical animations. ▫ Language learning Animated Pedagogical Agents  Designed to teach children to read  monitors each student’s performance continuously and adapts the study plan  Capable of providing feedback to students

Introduction Studies have shown that effective individual tutoring is the most powerful mode of teaching. ▫ Logically and financially unfeasible. Animated pedagogical agents offer enormous promise for interactive learning environments. Despite the progress, much remains to be done.

Introduction cont’d Research objective ▫ To design, develop and implement a virtual tutor  To develop a powerful new approach for investigating engaging and effective communication  To develop an environment for supplemental learning purposes.  Create realistic 3D animated model to be used as virtual tutor

Approach Interface design ▫ The interface consists of three main parts:  an overview window.  the agent window.  the content explanation window. ▫ Quiz interface components:  Question and answer area  Agent window  Report window ▫ Audio and phoneme files generated using tts  Will be changed to a human voice

Approach cont’d Generating audio and phoneme files ▫Use avatar-CUAnimate toolkit  Using the text-to-speech component ▫Tts file – 2 separate files  Simple.wav file  Phoneme.txt file

Avatar- CUAnimate toolkit

Lecture screenshot

Lecture screenshot with illustration

Quiz Screenshot

Other models Are just a few of the models

Evaluation Preliminary testing of Agent ▫ Tested on Bowie State University students. ▫ Observing subject’s perception. ▫ To assess student:  12 survey questions on a 5 point Likert scale.  Rated with a score range 1 – 5.

Sample Questionnaire

Conclusion & future work Virtual Tutor can be used to supplement/teach lecture materials. ▫ Students will then be able to view the prepared lectures Preliminary testing proved hypotheses. New features will be added to application ▫ More modules developed ▫ Watch instructional videos ▫ User can keep track of grades Make available online.

Acknowledgements Thanks to: Dr. Yan. Department of Computer science. Research made possible through grants from: NSF: SGER: Research to Improve Communication by Pedagogical Agents (Award No. IIS ).