A Procedure to Create a Pedagogic Conversational Agent in Secondary Physics and Chemistry Education

Abstract

Pedagogic Conversational Agents are computer applications that can interact with students in natural language. They have been used with satisfactory results on the instruction of several domains. The authors believe that they could also be useful for the instruction of Secondary Physics and Chemistry Education. Therefore, in this paper, the authors present a procedure to create an agent for that domain. First, teachers have to introduce the exercises with their correct answers. Secondly, students will be presented the exercises, and if the students know the answer, and if it is correct, more difficult exercises will be presented. Otherwise, step-by-step natural language support will be provided to guide the student towards the solution. It is the authors’ hypothesis that this innovative teaching method will be satisfactory and useful for teachers and students, and that by following the procedure more computer programmers can be encouraged to develop agents for other domains to be used by teachers and students at class.