MITHOS (BMBF Project, 2021-2024)
Interactive Training in Mixed-Reality to Dealing with Heterogeneity and Conflict Situations at School
Teachers often feel poorly prepared to deal with complicated socio-emotional challenges like heterogeneous learning groups or social conflicts. This requires effective methods to emotion and conflict regulation, which are not trained systematically in teacher training courses.
The goal of MITHOS is to support a sustainable acquisition of social skills for the classroom through mixed-reality. MITHOS provides realistic socio-emotional training scenarios, in which teachers and teacher trainees can prepare better for the challenges when facing conflicts in heterogeneous groups in class. The project realise this though an immersive mixed-reality environment. It integrates a man-controlled avatar and a number of virtual pupils who act differently based on artificial intelligence techniques. Precise real-time facial, body and verbal social signals of the teachers is captured through sensors. They can then train to be aware of their own needs and their empathic behaviour, as well as their perspective taking and conflict regulation in heterogeneous learning groups. This human-oriented and generalisable concpet is an innovative combination of mixed reality und sensor technology to simulate interactive virtual agents. This allows an exchange of social signals, natural social feedback and the merging of virtual and real experiences.
ACG will model the interaction and define conflict scenarios for the training. It will also model the feedback mechanisms for implict and explicit feedback. Implicit social feedback will for example define the interaction of the agents which will react through situation-specific and person-adaptive behaviours. This requires a close collaboration with the social signal interpretation to turn typical behaviour classifiers into predictable behaviour models for the agents. Explicit feedback will include indicators of how to adapt ones empathic behaviour in a situation. ACG is also the coordinator of the project.
Demo video:
Partners:
* Universität Augsburg
* Universität des Saarlandes – Empirische Bildungsforschung und Fachdidaktik Deutsch Primarstufe
* TriCAT GmbH
* Paragon SemVox GmbH