Cairo Association of Teachers - Newsletter

CAT Tracks for May 7, 2006 ALEX - VIRTUAL PEER

Alex?

Growing up with "2001: A Space Odyssey", I would have suggested "HAL" as the name for the "pal". But then, again, HAL probably wouldn't last long in the classroom...he'd "snap" and do some headline-grabbing harm to the children!

From the Chicago Sun-Times...

Animated pal works on kids' literacy

BY DAVE NEWBART Staff Reporter

With the ease of a real child, Alex stares at his new playmates and begins to tell a long story about children in a home who find secret passageways and start searching for hidden treasure.

His playmates, two young girls from Plainfield, are asked to chime in, and they add their own versions of events. Then Alex tells some more.

The exercise -- taking place in a lab at Northwestern University -- is designed to increase literacy among children by having them listen to and then tell stories.

Alex is a "virtual peer," or in computer jargon, an embodied conversational agent -- an animated computer graphic that talks and interacts with children. The girls, McKenna Young, 7, and her sister, Kaleigh, 9, aren't very talkative at first but later open up and tell longer versions of what they think happened to the children in the house.

Although the two girls have no learning disabilities, the virtual peers are aimed particularly at helping children with learning disabilities or who speak a different dialect of English than what is normally taught in public schools.

Alex was created by a team led by Justine Cassell, a professor of communication studies at Northwestern. Cassell developed the first embodied agent while a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania a dozen years ago. Now, others are using such agents to train doctors to take medical histories, simulate field interactions for the military or as museum guides on hand-held devices.

Can speak in vernacular

The computer boy tells stories to children, but then tries to get them to elaborate or expound on what he is saying. Such storytelling is key to children later learning how to read and write, Cassell said. The interactions are also key to teaching children with autism, for example, how to collaborate with peers, a skill such children lack. The characters can model appropriate storytelling behavior.

Or he can speak in a vernacular that is understood by African-American children who are not used to the standard American English required in most schools. Alex can help them learn standard English and also how to switch back and forth between the dialect they speak at home and what is required at school, Cassell said.

In a study of 31 4- and 5-year-olds who sat with a virtual peer four times, their scores on a test of language development increased 5 percent over their scores before sitting with the peer.

In the room at Northwestern's Evanston campus, which Cassell has dubbed the "ArticuLab," Alex appears life-size on a 50-inch plasma screen. In front of him is a dollhouse rigged with sensors so the computer knows in which rooms a child might be playing with figures.

Not enough teachers

Cassell, who has doctorates in psychology and linguistics from the University of Chicago, fixated on animated characters as a means to teach children literacy skills because there are simply not enough teachers to work with children one-on-one.

"If we could sit a teacher down with every kid, we'd do great," Cassell said. "But we don't even have one teacher per 20 children." And real children are good playmates but don't have the knowledge of an adult or the persistence of a computer program to help children with social delays or other difficulties.

To connect with children, however, the characters need to resemble humans as closely as possible, Cassell said. So her research looks extensively at how children communicate -- how they speak and how they use gestures. She works with computer science students to program that into the actual character.

Technology advancing quickly

Jonathan Gratch, project leader at the University of Southern California Institute for Creative Technologies, said such work on virtual peers could also be used to help therapists role-play with adults with social phobias or anger management issues.

Still, the virtual storyteller, like any computer program, has bugs.

Cassell hasn't been able to find voice recognition software that works well with children, so the characters aren't able to have a conversation with a child. But Cassell said the technology is moving so fast that the virtual peers could be ready to be used in schools or community centers within a year or so.

Until then, she said, she's worried about a trend among some teachers to squash children's "fantasy lives" by telling kids not to make stuff up -- treating the stories as lies instead of a learning step.

"Kids have to have an opportunity to take what's in their head and tell it to someone else," she said. "That's how you obtain literacy."