Proposal of a Parameterized Atmosphere Generation Model in a Virtual Classroom

Abstract

The training program of high school teachers in Japan lacks the chance to practice teaching skills and the admission of classes. The result is, many young teachers left their jobs in the first year due to frustration and other mental issues. In order to relieve this issue, we are running a project to develop a platform of virtual school environment and virtual students which allows the teacher trainees to practice with. As part of this platform, in order to send feedbacks to the trainee to stimulate them to improve their performance, we propose the use of the whole group of virtual students to generate per- ceivable atmospheres. Three research issues then emerge:(1) Whether the atmospheres in a classroom can be expressed in a computational (parameterized) model? (2) If the answer to (1) is 'yes', what are the elements to construct atmospheres? (3) The perception of atmospheres can be considered as very subjective, how to make the model objective becomes the last research issue. This paper presents our investigation on these issues and propose a parameterized atmosphere generation model based on empirical results.