The impact of pedagogical agents in 3D collaborative serious games

This paper examines the impact of an pedagogical agent (PA), in a 3D collaborative educational game in the virtual environment of OpenSim platform. The main goal of this paper is to evaluate the impact of a pedagogical agent to 3D collaborative game based learning by developing an agent that interacts with the students both at team and personal level. In order to enhance the already implemented 3D game functions, a pedagogical agent that supports students during the game learning process was implemented. The evaluation approach attempts to investigate the impact of PAs in 3D collaborative educational games focusing on two dimensions: a) on PAs usefulness in collaborative 3D games and b) on students´ teams performance in the game learning process. This research concludes that the intervention of pedagogical agent´s assistance in the game has a strong positive impact on teams performance and can be considered as useful in collaborative serious games.