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.
Academic Press, 2016. p. 129-168