SCIPR

The labor market today increasingly demands higher order skills called socio-emotional (SEL) skills, which refer to a broad repertoire of competencies and character qualities that complement foundational literacy and numeracy, and enable individuals to approach complex challenges in their changing environment. Some examples include creativity, collaboration, persistence (grit), leadership, curiosity etc. Curiosity is a vital SEL skill in educational contexts, and curiosity and exploratory behaviors are believed by many to be tightly intertwined with one another. According to contemporary accounts curiosity is caused by: (1) the desire for information, which leads to exploratory behaviors in search of missing knowledge and is satisfied when this knowledge gap is filled appropriately (Loewenstein, 1994); and (2) pleasurable feelings aroused by the anticipation of acquiring new knowledge through exploratory behavior (Spielberger and Starr, 1994). In a virtuous cycle, positive feelings derived from both learning experiences make positive impacts on students’ beliefs about their competence in mastering scientific processes, in turn promoting greater breadth and depth of exploration of information related to problem solving (Wu & Miao, 2013). Consequently, curiosity has been identified as a critical character quality to prepare students for lifelong learning in the 21st century (World Economic Forum, 2015).

While on one hand, curiosity has traditionally been described as an inherently individual and stable disposition toward seeking novelty and approaching unfamiliarity, other research also suggests that curiosity can be mediated by and fostered through social interactions with parents, teachers and other children (Engel, 2011). Social factors in learning environments play a critical role in influencing student’s curiosity and exploration both in and outside of schools. This is because knowledge can be constructed socially through peer interaction and collaboration, and academic motivation and outcomes are also often influenced by peers (Parr and Townsend, 2002).

With the recent increase of computer technology in science education, a research agenda is emerging to understand the opportunities and challenges of designing and adopting technologies in school classrooms. Although the novelty of technologies often motivates students briefly to explore new technology-enhanced learning materials, it remains challenging to shift from pure perceptual curiosity to epistemic curiosity related to specific science topics, and maintain the latter curiosity at an optimal level. In addition to the learning materials, instructional approaches within the classroom such as teacher’s scaffolding and social dynamics in collaborative learning also contribute in nurturing students’ interests and skills, which are unfortunately often neglected in technology-driven investigations. In addition, while the importance of SEL factors in the context of collaborative learning has long been recognized (Kreijns et al., 2003), only a small subset of the current generation of learning technologies actually aim to foster or develop SEL skills in students. We believe that expanding the social capability or the ability of learning technologies to provide a social infrastructure is important to facilitate acquisition of SEL skills in students. By social capabilities, we not only refer to the nature of the inner technical system that makes the interaction social (underlying model of behavior understanding/intelligence) (Cassell et al., 1999), but also to generating sensory/motor capabilities that affect social behavior (ability to engage group members in an interesting, relevant conversation with appropriate speech, body behaviors etc) (Breazeal, 2004).

In this project, we are motivated to explore the state-of-the-art learning and instructional approaches in schools, develop a systematic framework to foster curiosity in science education, and apply this framework to the design of a playful learning environment integrating advanced technologies in game, virtual and augmented reality, and multimodal sensing.

Role-playing games provide a natural role-switching mechanism, which may help children experience different roles such as question-asker and question-answerer in group interaction. In addition, role-playing games enable children to play very different roles in games than in real life, which may enhance their competencies in problem solving (Hammer, 2007). Furthermore, the game itself can provide a safe environment for children to experiment and explore without worrying about social risks such as failure.

Virtual peer scaffolding is a way to provide the educational benefits of collaborative learning before children naturally know how to collaborate. Since the intelligent virtual peer has demonstrated special capacity in supporting both learning and collaborative skills for young children (Cassell, 2004), we are working on designing a virtual child that can provide (1) necessary guidance such as introducing games and illustrating ways to play, and (2) key scaffolding such as taking risks, playing and switching between different roles, and collaborating with other players in scientific reasoning.

As curiosity is highly transient, it is important that the virtual child recognizes and responds to real-time learning states of the students. For example, noticing that the child playing the leading investigator role is not engaged in the game, the virtual child might try to provoke her curiosity in order to get her to explore solutions. This learning state information will be provided by MultiSense, a multimodal sensing system based on detection of visual, verbal and vocal cues and inferences about underlying learning states drawn from those cues. Multisense will automatically analyze behaviors such as facial expression, eye gaze, head gesture and voice quality to infer children’s engagement, collaborative behavior, curiosity, enthusiasm and scientific risk-taking.

Ideally a virtual peer is expected to interact with human players in the way human children interact with one another, except with advanced knowledge in scaffolding learning activities. There is, however, often an interaction barrier between the virtual peer, who is confined to virtual space, and children, who are situated in physical space. As recent research has demonstrated the special capacity of augmented reality technologies in externalizing and sharing human thoughts in physical space (Bai et al., 2015), we intend to explore opportunities of mixed-reality play environments to support collaborative learning experiences and face-to-face interaction between the virtual child and human players. In addition, research has shown that the tangible features of digitally augmented objects accelerate conceptualization development through direct manipulation with knowledge components in three-dimensional space. Therefore it will also be interesting to investigate the design space of digitally augmented objects as novel curiosity-evoking stimuli in supporting observation, experimentation and communication about scientific knowledge.

• Principal Investigator
  • Justine Cassell
• ArticuLab
  • Zhen Bai
  • Bhargavi Paranjape
  • Tanmay Sinha (alumnus)
  • David Slebodnick
  • Luo Yi Tan
• Oberlin Wintern 2016: Patrice DiChristina
• Spring 2016 Intern: Tristan Marino, Aliya Blackwood
• Spring 2016 Capstone students: Su Baykal, Benjamin Boesel, Ryan Donegan, Sam Gao, Ian Go
• Summer 2016 Interns: Jiamin Ping, Lu Sun, Shrey Shah, Bo Kim, Hyunji Do, Julia Luo, Sam Li, Stephanie Bao, Sina Siddiqi
• Fall 2016 Interns: Zoey Feng, Angela Liang, Michelle Deng, Hea Jin Cha, Jarret Lin, Changning Shou, Gaurav Lahiry, Olamitundun Oladipo
• Spring 2017 interns: Lu Sun, Danny Choo, Zoey Feng, Angela Liang, Michelle Deng, Lauren Yan, Kaily Bruch, Prachi Mahableshwarkar, Kanisha Vaughn, Vivian He