Intelligent Tutoring Systems for Ill-Defined Domains - Philippe ...

Interactive Narrative and Intelligent Tutoring for
Ethics Domain
Rania Hodhod and Daniel Kudenko
Computer Science Department, University of York, Heslington, York, YO10
5DD, UK
{Poprona, Kudenko}@cs.york.ac.uk
Abstract. This paper presents an interactive narrative system (AEINS) that
incorporates intelligent tutoring techniques for teaching in ill defined domains,
specifically ethics and citizenship. The version AEINS presented in this paper
targets students between the age of 9 and 12. In order to educate students about
ethics, the idea is to present and involve students in different moral dilemmas
(called teaching moments) which can act as an initiator for developing new or
deeper thoughts about different ethical situations. The system uses Kohlberg’s
moral dilemmas as part of its domain. Incorporating teaching moments in the
story generation context raises the issue of student agency. We discuss the
tradeoff between the level of agency necessary for the student to feel in control
of the story progression, and the level of system control necessary to avoid that
the story digresses from the educational targets. Our goal is to allow the
student/player to participate in an engaging and entertaining drama that is
directly influenced by his intentional actions in a consistent and meaningful
way, without affecting the educational targets or losing control over the
learning process.
Keywords: Interactive narrative, intelligent tutoring, ill defined domains,
Kohlberg’s moral dilemmas.
1 Introduction
Interactive Narrative (IN) is an approach to interactive entertainment that enables the
player to make decisions that directly affect the direction and/or outcome of the
narrative experience being delivered by the computer system. In the last ten years
there has been a noticeable increase in the application of narrative and drama to a
variety of contexts broadly in the area of education (see for example [1, 2, 3, 4, 9]).
These applications have drawn on theories that are both relevant to the design and
generation of learning environments and to the ways in which learners construct their
own understanding of their experience. The benefits should apply to children,
teenagers and adults. Not only do INs present learners with interesting and interactive
story-like experiences, but concepts from narrative can also be used to highlight
important aspects of the content, such as moral dilemmas. In addition, INs can contain