Virtual Pedagogical Agents as Aids for High School Physics Teachers

The Pathway project is improving the quality of physics teaching and the number of available physics teachers by providing virtual expert help on issues of pedagogy and content. The project combines Carnegie Mellon’s Synthetic Interviews and state-ofthe- art digital video library technology with pedagogical advances developed at Kansas State University, and materials contributed by master teachers. The Synthetic Interview is a technology and technique that creates an anthropomorphic interface into multimedia data of a particular kind: video of a person responding to questions (interacting with another person). The responses of the interviewee are presented in such a way as to simulate the experience of interacting with the expert.