Continuation of Workshops with Cognitive Agents
On December 19, 2023, the fifth workshop with gamified cognitive agents was held for students of II. Primary School Varaždin. The 6th-grade class, along with their Croatian language teacher Mirjana Halusek, designed a cognitive agent named Jura. Members of the Laboratory for Artificial Intelligence from the partner institution, the Faculty of Organization and Informatics, under the leadership of Prof. Dr. Markus Schatten, implemented and adapted Jura for use.
The workshop was led by computer science teacher Marinela Schatten, M.Sc., external collaborator, and Assoc. Prof. Dr. Markus Schatten, representatives of Partner 1 (Laboratory for Artificial Intelligence).
To recall: Conversational cognitive agents are artificial intelligence systems that include a speech interface (allowing direct conversation with them, i.e., they respond to human speech), a graphical interface (featuring an avatar that reacts to speech), and they are intelligent (able to automate various actions that a human would typically perform). Numerous scientific studies show that the application of conversational cognitive agents in education yields very good results in achieving learning outcomes.
By the end of the project, there are plans to conduct 10 workshops for students, involving a total of 12 teachers in their development and implementation. Students with difficulties will participate in all workshops to test the newly developed teaching methods based on gamification and artificial intelligence.
The main goals of each workshop are:
- Acquisition of STEAM skills for students, especially those with difficulties.
- Testing new methods and techniques for teaching STEAM content using STEAM methods (acquired by teachers in educational workshops in Activity 1).
- Testing new teaching methods based on gamification, artificial intelligence, and augmented reality (developed in Activity 2).
The created cognitive agent Jura, which focuses on pronouns, has been released as open-source software and is available for anyone interested to try at the following link: https://dragon.foi.hr/jura/
Photos from the workshop for the 6th-grade students are included below:
