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This study investigates the effectiveness of mobile video games for learning English language vocabulary among Chinese students in comparison with more standard electronic dictionary learning. This involved an ethnographic study of students in their natural learning environment which was followed by classroom testing of vocabulary proficiency. Results show that educational video games can both improve the student learning experience and student results when combined with traditional methods.

This chapter presents Companions interacting with children in real time, in a Collaborative Collocated Learning Game environment as a means of gaining a clearer understanding of the dynamics of interaction between the parties.

Companions are the evolution of Embodied Conversational Agents endowed with emotional abilities for establishing relationships, to care for and provide companionship for them.

The Learning Game environment is an ideal setting for observing how children construct social relationships with each other, and for our purposes, how they perceive Companions as their team-members, how these entities' embodiment impacted on them and the kind of social relationship these factors promoted.

The fact that Companions elicit positive emotions in children and influence their activities in a productive way is a core finding that may be viewed as a gateway to designing, implementing promising applications in diverse fields, from education to care, to companionship. We will show how the Wizard of Oz protocol can be used to develop a Conversational, Empathetic, and Domain Specific Interaction Strategy for Companions.

The material presented in this chapter will be of interest to application designers, developers working with interfaces that use agents as Companions or have Companion-like behavior, and/or to other specialists whose work would benefit from knowing more about developing enjoyable and productive interactive relationships between Companions and children.

This chapter explores the role of empathy in our relationship with technology. Empathy is defined as the human ability to put oneself in the place of another in order to better understand what that other person feels or thinks. In other words, it is the understanding and feeling of another person’s emotional and cognitive experience. This is a very human condition and not generally something we would associate with technology. However, as technology continues to evolve, particularly with the advent of more human technologies such as virtual agents who adopt a more involved relationship with their users, empathy has become more important. Empathy is a crucial aspect of human communication and as technology becomes more communicative, and more human, empathy will become an increasingly important part of our relationship with that technology.

  Existing Human Computer Interaction (HCI) strategies are seriously limited by current technologies. These are neither sensitive nor accurate enough to respond to users’ emotional states, the fundamental basis for effective communication in real time. This offered the challenge of investigating factors that would impact on the designing of effective and more emotionally intelligent interaction strategies for Companions. These were applied to a conceptual tool, the Affective Channel (AC), to endow Companions with emotional capabilities. This was implemented in the Wizard of Oz (WoZ) platform to evaluate Companions in real time. The WoZ is an experimental setup where existing immature technologies and a human operator combine to simulate Companion interaction with end users. In these aspects of my work is my original contribution to the HCI knowledge base.Experiments, focus groups and face to face interviews were carried out to ascertain users’ perception and expectations of virtual agents. ‘Descriptors’ thus identified formed the bases for the designing of user friendly Companions. Verbal and facial expressions data and other affective elements of effective human-companion interactionwere collected for use in the AC and the WoZ as stated above.Companion evaluations yielded the subsidiary contribution that Companions are perceived as empathetic, useful and trustworthy entities. Further, that they arouse positive emotions in children and also that they promote their learning improvement.These findings were the result of two experiments, one within subjects and one between subjects, conducted with thirty grade four pupils in a rural school in the poor Oaxaca region of Mexico.

Cognitonics is a new science which looks at ways to reconcile human socio-spiritual development with increasingly rapid human intellectual development in the new context of technological advances and increased cultural homogeny. This is particularly relevant in areas such as education and informatics where children are found to be increasingly capable to control and adapt to new technological advances yet often suffer from a lack of social development or are unable to engage with aspects of their own cultural heritage. In this study we consider the application of a cognitonics based approach to the problems of the Oaxacan education system, particularly for indigenous children who suffer from a loss of culture and diminished provision of education due to a lack of resources and regular teacher strikes. Specifically, we look at how the introduction of face-to-face collaborative video games can help develop academic, information-technology and social skills together while promoting spiritual well-being and cultural identity.

This paper presents a novel visual analytics technique developed to support exploratory search tasks for event data document collections. The technique supports discovery and exploration by clustering results and overlaying cluster summaries onto coordinated timeline and map views. Users can also explore and interact with search results by selecting clusters to filter and re-cluster the data with animation used to smooth the transition between views. The technique demonstrates a number of advantages over alternative methods for displaying and exploring georeferenced search results and spatio-temporal data. Firstly, cluster summaries can be presented in a manner that makes them easy to read and scan. Listing representative events from each cluster also helps the process of discovery by preserving the diversity of results. Also, clicking on visual representations of geo-temporal clusters provides a quick and intuitive way to navigate across space and time simultaneously. This removes the need to overload users with the display of too many event labels at any one time. The technique was evaluated with a group of nineteen users and compared with an equivalent text based exploratory search engine.

This paper describes a child’s mental model of an Embodied Conversational Agent (ECA) acting as a learning Companion. Embodied Conversational Agents are characters that interact with humans through the medium of conversation. Acting as a learning Companion, an ECA can support children or offer guidance toward improving the learning process. When a child uses an ECA they necessarily form some sort of mental model of the ECA and this will affect the manner in which they learn and ultimately determine the effectiveness of their learning. This paper considers what a child’s natural mental model of an ECA is, and how we can best develop an ECA interaction strategy to fit that mental model.