An Application of Ant Colony Optimization to Decision Making on Affective Virtual Entities

Learning is a never ending activity for humans; it takes place everywhere and even when we do not realize. However, current learning environments make students deal with lectures, mostly associated with low control of the situation and implicit motivation. In contrast, previous researches have shown that sports, games or hobbies are activities that make people reach optimal experiences where self-motivation, control of the situation, high level of concentration and enjoyment are present. Some current efforts to design next generation of learning environments make use of ubiquitous systems to encourage students to perform learning activities everywhere and at anytime. However, those approaches lack the affective factor related to optimal experiences. To address that problem we present eCoology, an edutainment application that creates a ubiquitous learning environment with emotional features, and discuss some experimental results obtained from users that tested eCoology.