Peer influence plays a crucial role in promoting classroom participation, where behaviors from active students can contribute to a collective classroom learning experience. However, the presence of these active students depends on several conditions and is not consistently available across all circumstances. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) such as GPT have demonstrated the ability to simulate diverse human behaviors convincingly due to their capacity to generate contextually coherent responses based on their role settings. Inspired by this advancement in technology, we designed ClassMeta, a GPT-4 powered agent to help promote classroom participation by playing the role of an active student. These agents, which are embodied as 3D avatars in virtual reality, interact with actual instructors and students with both spoken language and body gestures. We conducted a comparative study to investigate the potential of ClassMeta for improving the overall learning experience of the class.
ClassMeta: Designing Interactive Virtual Classmate to Promote VR Classroom Participation
Authors: Ziyi Liu*, Zhengzhe Zhu*, Lijun Zhu, Enze Jiang, Xiyun Hu, Kylie A Peppler, Karthik Ramani
In Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 1-17. 2024.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642947
Ziyi Liu
Ziyi Liu has been a Ph.D. student in the School of Mechanical Engineering at Purdue University since Fall 2021. He is conducting research under Professor Karthik Ramani's Convergence Design Lab. He received his Master's and Bachelor's degrees in Mechanical Engineering at Purdue University. His current research focuses on innovative human-computer interactions utilizing AR/VR, and AI in authoring/tutoring systems.