How to Create a Pedagogic Conversational Agent for Teaching Computer Science

Abstract

Pedagogic conversational agents are computer applications that can interact with students in natural language. They have been used with satisfactory results on the instruction of several domains. The authors believe that they could also be useful for the instruction of computer science programming. Therefore, in this chapter, the MEDIE methodology is described to explain how to create an agent to teach programming to primary education children and develop their computational thinking. The main steps are to communicate with the teacher team, to validate the interface, and to validate the functionality, practical sessions, and evaluation. The first two steps are covered in this chapter.