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This design case explores how an AI-supported, narrative-centered science learning game (SciStory: Pollinators) was designed over multiple iterations to support middle schoolers’ socioscientific learning, engagement, and persuasive writing. The case highlights how AI-driven conversational agents were designed to support student-led socioscientific inquiry, and the tensions our team explored as we integrated agents into a story game about community food systems, pollinators, and neighborhood land use.
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The AI Institute for Engaged Learning
Abstract The EngageAI Institute focuses on AI‐driven narrative‐centered learning environments that create engaging story‐based problem‐solving experiences to support collaborative learning. The institute's research has three complementary strands. First, the institute creates narrative‐centered learning environments that generate interactive story‐based problem scenarios to elicit rich communication, encourage coordination, and spark collaborative creativity. Second, the institute creates virtual embodied conversational agent technologies with multiple modalities for communication (speech, facial expression, gesture, gaze, and posture) to support student learning. Embodied conversational agents are driven by advances in natural language understanding, natural language generation, and computer vision. Third, the institute is creating an innovative multimodal learning analytics framework that analyzes parallel streams of multimodal data derived from students’ conversations, gaze, facial expressions, gesture, and posture as they interact with each other, with teachers, and with embodied conversational agents. Woven throughout the institute's activities is a strong focus on ethics, with an emphasis on creating AI‐augmented learning that is deeply informed by considerations of fairness, accountability, transparency, trust, and privacy. The institute emphasizes broad participation and diverse perspectives to ensure that advances in AI‐augmented learning address inequities in STEM. The institute brings together a multistate network of universities, diverse K‐12 school systems, science museums, and nonprofit partners. Key to all of these endeavors is an emphasis on diversity, equity, and inclusion.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2112635
- PAR ID:
- 10500513
- Publisher / Repository:
- Wiley
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- AI Magazine
- Volume:
- 45
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 0738-4602
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 69 to 76
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1002/aaai.12161
