An agent that helps children to author rhetorically-structured digital puppet presentations

Abstract

This paper describes a pedagogical agent that helps children to learn to author structured presentations about explanations of concepts. Using a Rhetorical Structure Theory analysis of a source Web page, the agent performs pedagogical tasks to support the user's understanding of rhetorical relations, stimulates reflection about the relations between the structure of the original text and the structure of the presentations, and suggests ways to improve the user's performance. Upon completion of the authoring, the presentations are organized into coherent structures that can be performed by animated characters, or Digital Puppets, in a learning-by-teaching classroom context.