A teacher trainer AI agent

Abstract

Teaching and teacher training are complex tasks that require more than just knowledge of a subject matter, but entail numerous interpersonal, social, and practical skills that a person ideally possesses to effectively participate and assist in the learning process of other students. Amongst the tasks that a student teacher needs to execute to help students learn is to create and maintain an orderly and supportive environment for learning. The work presented in this paper assists teacher trainees during their training process by simulating a virtual classroom environment, with artificially intelligent students, to replicate as much as possible a classroom situation enabling the student teachers to experience similar classroom circumstances in a safe environment. Participants will be more at ease knowing it is a mock setup where mistakes are conceded and that the whole experiment is repeatable and non-real, thereby leaving no serious repercussions on the student-teacher relationship and on the learning process itself. A wide variety of different student behaviours can be modelled for every individual agent, and a vast range of actions can be performed by the agents to respond to the user’s input. This contributes further to create as much as a realistic scenario as possible, thus producing an authentic teacher training setting that will help and contribute to the rest of the teacher training process. The environment developed was tested with real student teachers and the results and conclusions are presented.