A Simple Curious Agent to Help People be Curious

Curiosity is an innately rewarding state of mind that, over the millennia, has driven the human race to explore and discover. Many researches in pedagogical science have confirmed the importance of being curious to the students' cognitive development. However, in the newly popular virtual world-based learning environments (VLEs), there is currently a lack of attention being paid to enhancing the learning experience by stimulating the learners' curiosity. In this paper, we propose a simple model for curious agents (CAs) which can be used to stimulate learners' curiosity in VLEs. Potential future research directions will be discussed.

Authors

• Han Yu Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
• Zhiqi Shen Nanyang Technological University
• Chunyan Miao Nanyang Technological University
• Ah-Hwee Tan Singapore Management University

Keywords

• Curious agent
• human computer interaction
• virtual learning environment
• intelligent learning companion