An Advanced Tool for Authoring Multimedia Presentation

Abstract

In recent years, the label agent, used to specify from simple system process to highly expert software/hardware collections, denoting an entity created to perform either a specific task or set of tasks, has been included in the context of Artificial Intelligence. This trend takes place also in educational domain where agents are called Pedagogical Agents. By means of Pedagogical Agents teachers can create a new generation of learning environment: agents can display complex tasks, make use of locomotion and gesture to direct students’ attention on the most salient aspect of the task at hand, and convey emotional responses to the educational situation. The Visual Agent Scripting Helper (VASH) allows teachers to create multimedia projects in which it is possible to use pedagogical agents and to organise the agent’s behaviour in performing a specific educational task. Advanced educational contents will become commonplace only when the effort required to author them is reduced. Therefore authoring support is an essential component of VASH system which is an authoring tool and an interface for defining pedagogical agent behaviour. We should like to propose a conceptual framework in which the design and implementation of life-like pedagogical characters can be grounded. The system has been designed through a visual language interface that permits to script the agent behaviour, by dragging and dropping icons in the timeline of the multimedia sequence.