AutoMentor: Virtual Mentoring and Assessment in Computer Games for STEM Learning
AutoMentor: Virtual Mentoring and Assessment in Computer Games for STEM Learning
How can all students be assured the opportunity to learn significant STEM content? How can we as educators make STEM teaching more inclusive and motivating? The Epistemic Games Group seeks to answer these questions through the development of automated mentoring technology, called AutoMentor. This program, building on previous automated tutoring systems that help teach kids math and science through conversations in natural language, will help to provide motivation and mentoring for STEM students. The development of an Automentor will take place through successive iterations of Urban Science and Land Science at Massachusetts Audubon Society sites.
AutoMentor also helps us assess how well students think and act like STEM professionals within epistemic games. In doing so, the project explores whether an automated mentoring system can provide effective professional feedback from non-player-characters. The AutoMentor module represents a significant contribution to our knowledge about both learning in general and game-based learning specifically and will provide a powerful technology for incorporating STEM expertise into STEM educational activities.
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Padraig Nash recently did an EdLab Seminar titled “Distributed Mentoring: Scaffolding Learning in Educational Video Games” where he discussed his research and findings about the concept of distributed mentorship, how it relates to the learning experience and, in turn, how that learning experience can be translated to video games.
In epistemic games much of the teaching and mentoring happens in a remote location away from the players. Mentors must respond to players’ questions and issues from virtual communication in the game. Without access to visual cues such as facial expressions or gestures, it can be difficult for mentors to understand where the problem is and how to remedy the situation.
According to a New York Times Magazine article from 2008, Air Force pilots, remote piloting their planes from Nevada, experience a similar issue. These pilots are suffering from an experience called ‘sensory isolation’ that is having adverse effects on their health, performance, and social lives.
“…remote pilots do not receive the kind of cues from their sense of touch and place that pilots who are actually in their planes get automatically. That makes flying drones physically confusing and mentally exhausting.” the article explains, “…it’s hard to grasp your environment when you’re not actually in it.”
Sensory isolation occurs when a person is cut off from a critical sense that may help them in the situation. For pilots it is their sense of touch and equilibrium; for epistemic mentors it is the sense of sight and interpersonal communication tension.
The Epistemic Games project AutoMentor is one way to address the potential tensions that mentors face in virtual interactions. One of the goals of this project is to automate some, or all, of the mentor processes in epistemic games by coding for player issues and mainstreaming the process of game mentoring.
Bagley, Elizabeth A. S. (2011) Stop Talking and Type: Mentoring in a Virtual and Face-to-Face Environmental Education Environment. University of Wisconsin-Madison.
As the saying goes, imitation is the best form of flattery. How could we argue with the age-old phrase?
Epistemic Games deliberately copies real-world situations to create convincing games, mimicking a profession as accurately as possible to create the professional feel of the game. To achieve this, our team identifies professionals and professional environments to emulate in a game.
The current imitation project at Epistemic Games is AutoMentor. Our game designers are creating an automated mentoring program so that instead of a person chatting online in real-time with players, the program could respond to in-game situations and interact with the players. But like any other project, we need a template to model our game feature.
For this, we choose Robin Stuart. Robin is an Education Coordinator for Mass Audubon, a collaborating institution for Epistemic Games. She has taught in classrooms before, but is currently a Teacher Naturalist at Mass Audubon where she teaches environmental education through experimental and inquiry based learning in informal settings. Continue reading »
AutoMentor is a collaborative effort which seeks to create an automated tutoring device which can be implemented across game platforms to teach 21st century skills. With this program, we look to provide players with the motivation and guidance needed to learn and complete tasks in games such as Land Science. In addition, AutoMentor can help our researchers assess how well the players are thinking like professionals while playing the game.
