Related papers: Conversational agents for fostering curiosity-driv…

Question asking is an important tool for constructing academic knowledge, and a self-reinforcing driver of curiosity. However, research has found that question asking is infrequent in the classroom and children's questions are often…

Curiosity-driven learning has shown significant positive effects on students' learning experiences and outcomes. But despite this importance, reports show that children lack this skill, especially in formal educational settings. To address…

Using online information discovery as a case study, in this position paper we discuss the need to design, develop, and deploy (conversational) agents that can -- non-intrusively -- guide children in their quest for online resources rather…

Conversational agents are becoming increasingly popular for supporting and facilitating learning. Conventional pedagogical agents are designed to play the role of human teachers by giving instructions to the students. In this paper, we…

Research has shown that human-agent relationships form in similar ways to human-human relationships. Since children do not have the same critical analysis skills as adults (and may over-trust technology, for example), this…

Infants acquire language with generalization from minimal experience, whereas large language models require billions of training tokens. What underlies efficient development in humans? We investigated this problem through experiments…

Curiosity is the strong desire to learn or know more about something or someone. Since learning is often a social endeavor, social dynamics in collaborative learning may inevitably influence curiosity. There is a scarcity of research,…

Curiosity is a vital metacognitive skill in educational contexts, leading to creativity, and a love of learning. And while many school systems increasingly undercut curiosity by teaching to the test, teachers are increasingly interested in…

Historically, researchers have focused on analyzing WEIRD, adult perspectives on technology. This means we may not have technology developed appropriately for children and those from non-WEIRD countries. In this paper, we analyze children…

Conversational teachable agents offer a promising platform to support learning, both in the classroom and in remote settings. In this context, the agent takes the role of the novice, while the student takes on the role of teacher. This…

In many real-world scenarios where extrinsic rewards to the agent are extremely sparse, curiosity has emerged as a useful concept providing intrinsic rewards that enable the agent to explore its environment and acquire information to…

Previous studies have highlighted the benefits of pedagogical conversational agents using socially-oriented conversation with students. In this work, we examine the effects of a conversational agent's use of affiliative and self-defeating…

Curiosity is a vital metacognitive skill in educational contexts. Yet, little is known about how social factors influence curiosity in group work. We argue that curiosity is evoked not only through individual, but also interpersonal…

Infants are experts at playing, with an amazing ability to generate novel structured behaviors in unstructured environments that lack clear extrinsic reward signals. We seek to replicate some of these abilities with a neural network that…

With children talking to smart-speakers, smart-phones and even smart-microwaves daily, it is increasingly important to educate students on how these agents work-from underlying mechanisms to societal implications. Researchers are developing…

Computational thinking, and by extension, computer programming, is notoriously challenging to learn. Conversational agents and generative artificial intelligence (genAI) have the potential to facilitate this learning process by offering…

The design of recommendations strategies in the adaptive learning system focuses on utilizing currently available information to provide individual-specific learning instructions for learners. As a critical motivate for human behaviors,…

What are the functions of curiosity? What are the mechanisms of curiosity-driven learning? We approach these questions about the living using concepts and tools from machine learning and developmental robotics. We argue that…

This chapter examines the relationship between curiosity and metacognition as critical drivers of autonomous and self-regulated learning. We synthesize recent research to propose a unified framework integrating behavioral, computational,…

In order to bring artificial agents into our lives, we will need to go beyond supervised learning on closed datasets to having the ability to continuously expand knowledge. Inspired by a student learning in a classroom, we present an agent…