An Intelligent Pedagogical Agent for In-The-Wild Interaction in an Open-Ended Learning Environment for Computational Thinking

Adaptive support can help learners in Open-Ended Learning Environments (OELEs), where the free-form nature of the interaction can be confusing to students. In this paper, we design and evaluate an Intelligent Pedagogical Agent (IPA) for an OELE designed to foster Computational Thinking (CT). Specifically, we design help interventions for an in-the-wild scenario where students interact with the OELE in an unmonitored, self-directed manner. We build a student model by extracting meaningful student behaviors on real-world interaction data obtained during interaction in online classrooms and including expert insights. We show that these student models perform better than a baseline and have the potential for adaptive support in self-directed interaction with the OELE. We design an IPA with the help of teachers, leveraging the student behaviors extracted from data. Lastly, we get insights into the value of these help interventions by empirically evaluating the IPA in a formal user study.