The Design Method of the Virtual Teacher

Using robots and virtual agents as teachers in education is one of the most important fields in HAI. Many pieces of work have been published; however, little has been reported on the relationship between the subject on which a virtual teacher (VT) gives a lesson and the appearance of the VT. For example, are robot-like agents usually effective regardless of the subject being taught? In this paper, we hypothesized that the subject and the appearance of the VT affect students' level of understanding through the interaction of the two. To verify this, we conducted an experiment with two factors: subject and VT appearance. Under all conditions, the participants watched movies in which VTs gave a lesson, and they took a short test on the lesson and provided a subjective evaluation on the VTs. As a result, the subject and appearance affected the short-test scores through the interaction of the two. This result suggests a novel design method that can be used to construct a VT.