Prototyping a Virtual Agent for Pre-school English Teaching

TL;DR

This paper presents a case study on developing a virtual agent for preschool English learning, emphasizing a human-centered, multidisciplinary approach integrating gamification and storytelling to enhance engagement.

Contribution

It introduces a novel multidisciplinary design process for creating an educational virtual agent tailored for preschool language learning.

Findings

Multidisciplinary approach improves IVA development effectiveness.

Gamification and storytelling increase engagement among preschool children.

Feasibility of IVA for early language education is demonstrated.

Abstract

This paper describes a case study and the insights gained from prototyping an Intelligent Virtual Agent (IVA) for English vocabulary building for Spanish-speaking preschool children. After an initial exploration to evaluate the feasibility of developing an IVA, we followed a Human-Centered Design (HCD) approach to create a prototype. We report on the multidisciplinary process used that incorporated two well-known educative concepts: gamification and story-telling as the main components for engagement. Our results suggest that a multidisciplinary approach to developing an educational IVA is effective. We report on the relevant aspects of the ideation and design processes that informed the vision and mission of the project.