Prototyping a Virtual Agent for Pre-school English Teaching
This addresses the challenge of early language education for a specific demographic, but it is incremental as it applies existing concepts like gamification and storytelling to a new context.
The paper tackled the problem of English vocabulary building for Spanish-speaking preschool children by prototyping an Intelligent Virtual Agent using a Human-Centered Design approach, and the result suggested that this multidisciplinary method was effective, though no concrete numbers were provided.
This paper describes a case study and the insights gained from prototyping an Intelligent Virtual Agent (IVA) for English vocabulary building for Spanish-speaking preschool children. After an initial exploration to evaluate the feasibility of developing an IVA, we followed a Human-Centered Design (HCD) approach to create a prototype. We report on the multidisciplinary process used that incorporated two well-known educative concepts: gamification and story-telling as the main components for engagement. Our results suggest that a multidisciplinary approach to developing an educational IVA is effective. We report on the relevant aspects of the ideation and design processes that informed the vision and mission of the project.