From 7 to 77

I Teach You and You Teach Me!

Tiago Amaral

and Isabel Machado Alexandre

Instituto de Telecomunicações & Instituto Universitário de Lisboa (ISCTE-IUL),

Av. Forças Armadas, 1646-026 Lisboa, Portugal

Keywords: Interactive Digital Storytelling, Serious Games, Human-Computer Interaction, Autonomous Agents,

Collaboration.

Abstract: This paper presents a project that aims to devise an innovative interactive application, more precisely a

serious game, covering the topic of financial education. The topic is quite relevant nowadays, not only in

Europe but worldwide, and is also one of the major issues on most government’s agendas. The aim of this

application is by using a storytelling framework devise a collaborative platform, where people from 7 to 77

acquire or enhance their financial skills. To do this, the application tackles several research fields such as

interactive digital storytelling, collaboration human-computer interaction, autonomous agents, etc.

1 MOTIVATION

The presence of stories in our live existence is a fact,

and any of us can tell a story about his/her own life.

Throughout our life development the use of stories

start assuming a bigger importance since it helps

children to explore new situation, to understand the

world that surrounds them. The safe environment of

fantasy tales and make-believe activities helps them

to explore situations that they are usually afraid to

experiment in real life.

Nevertheless, new forms of make-believe and

fantasy take place in their lives: video games,

computer games, and the opportunity to participate

in dramatic games and theatre performances at

school. There is evidence that through these games

children learn to master all the new knowledge, and

to socially relate with their peers. Further, dramatic

play promotes social competence, emotional

development, or general well-being of the child, by

enhancing each child’s capacities of imagery and

developing overt social and behavioural skills.

The use of narrative is not only present in

children’s learning environments, since it is common

to devise role play training sessions for the

acquisition of a specific skill. Moroever, serious

games have appeared with the aim of developing

innovative games that deal with themes of different

areas (such as, medical and health training,

education, cultural training and public awareness

(Zielke et al., 2009).

Based on these finding, it is clear that drama

education is an excellence medium to convey

learning and knowledge acquisition. Taking all these

findings in consideration, it is possible to envision

the application of such methods in financial learning

environment. The research projects developed in the

field of educational storytelling have as their main

goal to portray educational material in an interactive

format that aims to provide a higher level of

engagement of the learners. Learners no longer have

a passive role in their learning process, but they take

part now in interactive and appealing situations, in

which their actions matter. The knowledge

acquisition processes itself in a more implicit and

natural way, since it is now mainly achieved by a

direct exploration and intervention of the learner of

different learning situations. The idea of portraying

financial education topics into a narrative

environment emerges from the success of several

research projects which used a narrative approach

for attaining educational and edutainment objectives.

For example, the Networked Interactive Media In

Schools (NIMIS) project – in particular Teatrix

application (Machado et al., 2005), the POGO

project (Rizzo et al., 2003), etc.) As we have seen

until now, there are strong evidence that supports the

idea of developing a serious game (Michael and

Chen, 2005) aiming at financial literacy

587

Amaral T. and Machado Alexandre I..

From 7 to 77 - I Teach You and You Teach Me!.

DOI: 10.5220/0004333605870591

In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Agents and Artiﬁcial Intelligence (ICAART-2013), pages 587-591

ISBN: 978-989-8565-39-6

 2013 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

improvement for children and even older kids, but

what about the adults and seniors? In the field of

narrative intelligence, it is common to have virtual

learning environment where the aim is to train

people in a specific simulated context (see for

example (Riedl et al., 2008) and (Swartout et al.,

2006), etc.), but to promote the acquisition of

mastery in a particular subject is more difficult.

Even more difficult, is to find an application that

aims to cover a target public from 7 to 77 years old.

The problem of a universal interface for all is under

study for some time (see for example (Stephanidis,

2001)), but since the nature, medium of usage of the

applications is in constant change, there aren’t yet a

well-established set of guidelines. Also, in the case

of elderly people there still exists a low level of

computer literacy. This project tackles another

important issue, when considers that each interaction

should be collaborative, which means that two

players must join efforts to succeed in the game. The

notion of collaboration has been vastly explored, and

there are strong findings that it improves the learner

progression, but sometimes there is the need for

mediation (Roschelle and Teasley, 1995). With the

purpose of mediation, we introduced an internal

social network that aims to provide the space for the

players to clarify/reflect their intentions on the

game, in order to proceed in the interaction or even

to elicit new interactions with different players. This

internal social network is a medium to achieve a

social meaning construction (Stahl, 2006).

2 THE IDEA

The aim of this project is to develop a computational

platform that promotes a better understanding of

financial literacy. This issue is increasingly relevant

given the economic and financial situation that all

countries, particularly in Europe, are going through.

In 2005 (OECD), the OECD published a study on

financial education at an international level, with the

aim of boosting the development of financial literacy

of consumers by indicating best practices to be

implemented at by each countries.

Since 2009, as a result of the financial crisis,

financial literacy has been increasingly recognized

as an asset to the individual (

OECD/INFE). In

Portugal, the Bank of Portugal held a questionnaire

on the Financial Literacy of the Portuguese

population, in 2010, in order to assess the attitudes

and behaviors of the Portuguese population in the

management of personal finances and their financial

knowledge (SFLPP, 2011). In parallel the National

Plan for Financial Training (2011-2015) (PNFF,

2011) was established in Portugal, aiming to

improve the level of financial literacy of the

population, promote the adoption of adequate

financial attitudes and behaviors, increase well-

being and contribute to financial stability and

economic growth. This plan also sets out various

target groups: students in elementary, high-school

and university, vulnerable groups and general

population. Given this reality, the idea of

researching and developing an interactive computer

application that empowers financial education from

7 to 77 years old has emerged. This application aims

at being both entertaining and educational, thus

inserting itself in the field of edutainment, which

intends to make the convergence of entertaining

activities, for example through video games, and

educational objectives, the first being the ideal

vehicle for presenting educational topics (Addis,

2005). More recently, this type of application has

been coined as serious games, which are meant to be

playful, but their ultimate goal is always learning

(Frasca, 2007).

To have a better understanding of the purpose of

such a wide and different target public, it is

necessary to explain how we envision the interaction

within the application. The application is

collaborative by nature, since each person must

always interact with a second player in order to be

successful in the game. This collaboration is based

on the transmission of knowledge, as has been a

tradition, when the older and wiser members of the

tribe communicated the cultural knowledge to the

youngest (so in every interaction, we will always

have two players with a generation gap between

them). To achieve this collaboration, we must

contemplate the existence of human and artificial

players - conceptualized by autonomous intelligent

agents - so that it is always possible for a given

player to play with the application. Having also as

an inspiration the transmission of knowledge over

time, we envision all interactions through the

generation/construction of narratives. Stories have

always been part of human culture, and although

civilization has passed through several changes

(cultural, evolutionary, etc.), they remain inside and

around us.

Taking these facts into consideration, it is quite

straightforward to imagine the application of

narrative in a learning context, and why not in a

serious game? The narratives will enrich the

application as they will be the vehicle for the

transmission of the literacy concepts, and

simultaneously, stories are created by players, in

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order to allow them to translate their

interpretations/perspectives of their interaction

within the application. This interpretation and

perspective can then be shared among the various

players - a social network of the application, which

could be used for future interactions with the

application since two players who share the same

perspective can play together in the future. Again,

these stories will be created either by human players

or by artificial players. Finally, it is necessary to

ensure that the main goal of the application is

achieved; therefore a centralized mechanism for

narrative control must be introduced (Riedl et al,

2008), in order to guarantee that each player’s action

will be meaningful for the achievement of the

pedagogical goals.

3 CHALLENGES

This project aims to tackle the problem of how to

improve the financial literacy of people in general,

with serious game. The problem is well known, and

it is present in most countries agenda for the next

couple of years. So it’s relevance for the society in

general, is a fact and an urgent need. From a

computational perspective, the lack of financial

literacy knowledge provides an interesting domain

to explore a set of novel and innovative ideas that

has never been gathered in unique interactive

computational platform. The major computational

issues to be researched and developed within this

project are: - How to use a narrative structure to

present the different concepts associated with

financial education? - What kind of narrative

structures are the most appropriated to provide

different experiences for the players, in their

different interactions? - How can I track the

achievements of each player without being too

intrusive? - Is it possible to create player pattern

profiles in order to provide richer and more

pedagogical interactions? - How can I devise a

graphical user interface that meets the needs of a

target public from 7 – 77 years old? - What usability

problems must be avoided and tracked for the

success of the serious game? - How can we endow

the artificial players with different skills accordingly

to their supposed age? - Is it relevant to provide the

artificial players with different personality traits, to

have a more engaging and rich interaction between

players? - How can we promote a healthy

collaboration between human players, without any

explicit mediation process? - What can be learnt

from the internal social network, for the

improvement or even adaptation of the artificial

agents in order to provide richer and more

pedagogical interactions? - Are the interpretations of

artificial players – the stories being told - as

engaging as the ones from human players? - Are the

artificial interpretations richer enough to elicit new

games with human players?

These different issues can be grouped in four

different areas: interactive digital storytelling,

human computer interaction, collaboration and

social meaning/perspective taking. The area of

interactive digital storytelling, more precisely the

generation of narratives as a medium to convey a

pedagogical message has already been tackled

before (Marsella et al., 2000), (Swartout et al.,

2006), (Vanniniet al., 2010), etc.), but not in the

same way, since in this project we do not aim to

have a unique and general story but to have a

general plot with n-parallel plots that are

interactively created and linked as a result of the 2-

players collaboration. The set of main plot plus

secondary stories are not predefined, they emerge

from the interactions. Nonetheless, in order to

guarantee the achievement of the pedagogical goal a

centralised mechanism is also introduced (similar to

(Riedl et al., 2008)). The creation of stories is also

conveyed in the interpretation of the artificial

player’s interactions. These interpretations are not

only a mere log file of the agent’s actions, but a

story of the experience, which can be affected by the

agent’s personality, mood, age, etc. The human

computer interaction field is also a major issue in the

project, because of the wide and different target

population that it is aimed for. The problem of a

universal interface for all is under study for some

time (see for example (Stephanidis, 2001)), but since

the nature, medium of usage of the applications is in

constant change, there aren’t yet a well-established

set of guidelines. This issue is going to be mainly

tackled through the conduction of a participatory

design (Schuler and Namioka, 1993) with different

age groups and in multiple platforms (mobile,

desktop, laptop, etc.).

At the end of the development, an exhaustive

evaluation is going to be conducted aiming at

gathering a large set of data that can help us to draw

some conclusions on the graphical design decisions

taken. From a collaborative perspective, some issues

must be taken into account since however we

envision a healthy collaborative thread, some

unexpected situations may occur in human-human

collaborative interactions. Behind the definition of

collaborative interaction is the notion of: ”the

collaborative construction of new problem solving

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knowledge. Collaboration is a process by which

individuals negotiate and share meanings relevant

to the problem-solving task at hand…. Collaboration

is a coordinated, synchronous activity that is the

result of a continued attempt to construct and

maintain a shared conception of a problem.”

(Roschelle and Teasley, 1995), however, since there

isn’t any control over the human free will some

problems may occur. The envisioned problems may

be for instance divergent interpretations of the

interaction, different beliefs about the story being

told, etc. To account for these we envision the

introduction of an internal social network where the

participants can reflect and input their interpretation

of the interaction (similar to (Machado and Paiva,

2002)). This internal social network may be the

medium for sharing each individual meaning but

also a tool for achieving a social meaning

construction (Stahl, 2006). Although, inevitably

useful for dealing with contradictory situations

during gameplay, this social interaction may

endanger the sense of immersion in the game and

within the story context. At the end, this project aims

to achieve results that demonstrate that: - The

application promotes a playful and enjoyable

medium for improving financial literacy across

different age groups. To prove this, a set of

guidelines and financial literacy goals are going to

be established, and a non-intrusive evaluation is

going to be applied. - The narrative approach taken

provides an engaging context for delivering the

financial education topics. - The graphical user

interface designed is well fitted for the target public.

During development several participatory design

sessions are going to be conducted with different age

groups, and at the end an exhaustive study. - The

collaboration provides a valuable medium for

constructing a shared social meaning and for taking

different story perspectives, eliciting a new way of

achieving knowledge.

4 CONCLUSIONS

In this paper, we present an innovative and

interactive application that portrays financial

education topics for a very heterogeneous target

population. The aim of the paper was to discuss the

main ideas of the project and demonstrate how these

ideas can be conceptualised and implemented in a

serious game.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This work was partly supported by Foundation of

Science and Technology (FCT) under the grants

PTDC/EEACRO/104658/2008,SFRH/BD/76438/20

11 and PEst-OE/EEI/LA0008/2011.

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