Transforming Learning through Agent Augmented Virtual World

Recent years have seen new forms of immersive learning such as interactive storytelling in virtual learning environment. Intelligent software agents are able to provide a more attractive narrative and get the users more involved in the unfolding of the story line in the virtual world. However, designing and implementing a software agent or a multi-agent system (MAS) for this purpose requires the developer to be highly skilled in agent oriented software engineering (AOSE) and a large investment in time and effort. This raises the hurdle to develop non-trivial agent augmented interactive e-learning applications. Our research proposes a framework - the multi-agent development environment (MADE) - to resolve this problem by abstracting the agent implementation part into a reusable runtime environment so as to enable less technically inclined people (e.g. teachers) and developers with limited knowledge in AOSE to rapidly prototype a multi-agent system to be incorporated into interactive learning applications.