During a presentation, an effective presenter will modify his/her own presentation style by observing the audience's reaction. To hone this skill, we have developed an audience robot that reacts according to the presenter's presentation style. The objective of this study is to propose a system that supports self-reflection after presentation practice with an audience robot, To modify the presentation style, the presenter needs to understand how the audience's psychological state corresponds to each reaction and what presentation style the presenter should adopt to modify the audience's psychological state. In addition. he/she needs to utilize this knowledge at the appropriate time, Therefore. during reflection, the presenter should evaluate whether he/she has such knowledge and whether he/she can utilize it. This study constructs a system that visualizes the presentation data graphically to represent each evaluation item clearly for effective consideration.

In creative activity, creators evaluate products whether they satisfy the criteria. Some criteria such as criteria of novelty are implicit and intuitive, so that it is difficult for novice creators to understand them. Since some criteria can be regarded as the existence of particular components, we can define the implicit criteria as the existence of components that the target product has. We propose a method for understanding implicit criteria by explaining it using existing components of the target product and construct system that supports proposed activity. Based on the evaluation experiment, it is found that proposed system can support enough explanation of criteria.

In team sports, where cooperation among several players is crucial, it is essential that teammates have a consistent decision prediction of the next play to be taken in a particular situation. One way to unifying plays in each situation is to look back at the situation in which the cooperation failed and discuss which play should have been taken. In such a discussion, players predict future states resulting from plays and attempt to reach a consensus based on the optimal outcomes. At this point, if players have different perceptions of the current scene or future expectations, comparing predicted futures becomes ineffective, and players may be unaware of these differences. This study aims to facilitate focused discussions on the comparison of future scenarios by implementing a system that visualizes and compares individual decision-making processes for players with differing perspectives.

Answering questions about our own research helps to clarify our arguments and advance our investigation. To generate questions about one's own research, we must view the research from different perspectives. In this study, we propose a method to view research from an outside perspective. The perspectives of others are reflected in the papers they have written; therefore, we constructed a system that supports researchers in extracting the research elements of other researchers' papers that are not considered in their own research and in capturing those elements in their own research.

To lead tactics to success in team sports, the player needs to judge whether they should apply the tactics based on the positional relationships of their allies, opponents, and other relevant factors. Players build up successful positional relationships based on the experience, i.e. to satisfy the positions of the allies and opponents of the success experience and exclude those of the failure experiences. However, novice players, due to lack of experience, do not have appropriate successful positional relationships. In order to acquire the successful positional relationships, two steps are necessary: to experience tactics with various positional relationships and to acquire the successful positional relationships from the experiential results. This paper focuses on supporting the first step and proposes a tactic simulation system for the given tactics and positional relationships.

In order to accomplish learning through extensive reading, readers need to be interested in the narrative. To entice readers to read a narrative, it is necessary to have an attractive and engaging introduction. However, this can be difficult, as reader preferences vary. An attractive introduction should provide "empathy" and "unexpectedness." To support creating such an introduction, this study proposes a method for extracting common and different narrative elements according to the reader's preferred category. This study also proposes a system that supports the extraction of such common and different narrative elements by considering typical elements of the identified category.

With the recent development of the robot technology, teacher robots will be introduced into educational settings to instruct learners. Such teacher robots, like human teachers, will be required not only to teach knowledge to learners, but also to monitor their learning process and motivate them. Positive learning attitudes can be ascertained by changing the learning strategy. The fact that learners change their learning strategies may indicate that they are making efforts to find an appropriate strategy. The learning strategies used by learners can be inferred from the tools they use to learn. Therefore, we propose a method to estimate learning strategies using Bayesian networks when learners change them.

Authors sometimes create narratives for the purpose of conveying the message (theme ). In addition, they often start with deciding the emotional genre (emotional impression), such as “sad story.” So far, our research group has defined a narrative discourse structure and has proposed the process for creating it from the theme and emotional impression. The process determines the order of deriving the elements in the discourse structure. However, some authors found difficult to derive them. This paper proposes a system for the step-by-step creation of the discourse structure along with the process by giving supports of deriving the elements.

For acquiring motor skills, players are often taught body shapes of the specific timing in the movement Such body shapes are not defined for all movement, even though the specific timing is known. Such important body shapes (IBS) are the characteristics of the body shapes that can be seen from successful players and that are not seen from unsuccessful players. This research proposes the extraction method of IBS of the specific timing from the body shapes of successful/unsuccessful players. On the other hand, players sometimes set easier sub-goals before training the target motor skill. The IBS extracted by the sub-goals may be easier to acquire than those extracted by the target movement. This research also determines the training order of IBS by the difficulties of sub-goals/target movement from which they are acquired.

Writing includes such elements of communication skills as expressing authorial intention in an understandable way that is acceptable to readers. Our research introduces a writing activity that cultivates communication skills by introducing a method for writing novels that are liked by the estimated target readers. An aspect of novels that may reflect individual preferences is the emotional experience produced by them. Therefore, this research proposes a method for creating novels that are liked by target readers from an emotional viewpoint. We first adopt story arcs as a representation of a reader model that expresses the emotional changes that readers are expected to experience from a novel. Second, we define the candidates of emotions for designing scenes from the viewpoint of the emotions of characters. Last, we develop a support system that not only suggests candidates for story arcs and characters’ emotions but also provides feedback when the emotions selected for characters fail to support the selected story arc.

Discovery learning is a learning method for understanding knowledge through repeated process of observation, hypothesis generation and verification. However, some students cannot generate hypotheses or verify generated hypotheses because such activities are usually done implicitly. In order to engage in the activities, to be aware of insufficiency of the activities by grasping the process of them explicitly is effective. This research proposes the discovery learning support system of biology by providing the interfaces for externalizing the processes.

In a paper introduction presentation of scientific papers, the presenter needs to understand the contents of a paper, summarizes them by slides and explains them to the audiences, such as participants the paper introduction activity, and discuss the contents with participants. However, if the presenter does not have enough skills for reading the contents deeply or for creating understandable slides, participants are not able to get the importance of the paper precisely and do not have fruitful discussion. For such situation, participants give questions to understand the paper. Therefore, questions regarding to the contents from other participants implicitly suggest problems with the presenter’s understanding of the paper and creating the slides. Therefore, it is valuable for the presenter to reflect on their skills that are used to prepare the paper introduction presentation based on the questions asked by other participants. This research proposes a reflection support environment for promoting the active and sufficient reflection using the questions asked by other participants. Our environment prepares an interface that records the activities involved in preparing the presentation, such as understanding papers and creating slides. Our environment also provides an interface with which the presenter can compare the recorded activities and the participants’ questions. By comparing the questions with their understanding of papers and created slides, the presenter is encouraged to recognize the insufficient points of their reading and presentation methods.

This study proposes an encouragement-support system that helps designers embody concrete products from vague concepts. Designers are sometimes required to create products based on given vague concepts such as “cool” car or “interesting” story. Some designers have difficulty embodying such vague concepts. To encourage actual products from vague concepts, we must scrutinize the components of products and interpret their concepts by their own viewpoints. This study proposes two maps to consider design: a product map with which designers can organize the detailed components of a product and a sense-word map that automatically represents the synonyms of words that represent the concepts. By focusing on the detailed components of the product and their concepts separately and combining concepts with detailed components, designers can create products that follow the given concepts.

Medical students refine their medical interview skills by practicing with simulated patients, which is generally called simulated interviews. A medical teacher observes the behaviors of medical students during the simulated interviews and gives them feedback. However, identifying all the bad behaviors and giving clear feedback is difficult. Our research is developing a system to support the reflection of medical teachers for simulated medical interviews. Our system visualizes the facial expressions of medical students and simulated patients and presents good/bad attitudes by analyzing their relationships. As a result of the actual teacher of the medical interviewer using the system, they commented that it became easier to give feedback and that the amount of feedback was increased.

When athletes train to acquire motor skills, they often get advice from friends or coaches. Since such advice is usually not shared by others, it is difficult for athletes who train alone to get it. The objective of this research is to develop an environment in which advice is stored and shared among other athletes. We prepared an advice repository that stores advices in a hierarchical structure based on their purposes and implemented a function for searching for advice and displaying the results based on effectiveness scores. Experimental evaluations indicated that the search and display methods of the search results were useful.

Thinking based on physical theory is crucial for understanding physics. Dynamics is the initial physical theory that Japanese students learn in high school physics. In the theory of dynamics, the motion of objects is explained as a resultant of two forces of different directions. If students are not able to grasp the motion of objects by a resultant of two forces, they will not understand dynamics in physics at all. To extend such a way of thinking, we developed a dialogue system that encourages students to approach the motion of objects from the viewpoint of forces by asking them to explain the differences of the motion of the objects in a picture based on the similarity of their forces. Our system gives hints to guide them to reach correct answers. The results of our evaluation experiment suggest that the system is effective for observing the motion of objects by the two forces of vertical and horizontal directions.

In the context of sports, coaches often have difficulty verbally explaining their advice about motor skills because they are tacit knowledge. To verbalize motor skills, coaches must understand “which part in the body” and “how” athletes must move their bodies. The objective of this study is to support coaches to notice “which part of the body” and “how” by operating the skeleton models of other athletes. We introduce our developed system that obtains the skeletons of athletes and provides an interface that coaches can manipulate. Then we experimentally evaluated its effectiveness.

Historical events include lessons of good and bad behaviors of human beings. To discover these lessons, we must generalize the historical event by the basic attributes, so that we can notice the underlying patterns that commonly occur in multiple historical events. Based on this viewpoint, we have developed a learning system that supports the generalization of historical events based on the basic attributes and helps finding lessons by comparing common patterns from two generalized events. In this paper, the effect of our system is discussed based on the experimental result.

To acquire motor skill, it is important to understand one's own movement and externalize it in words. Movement is regarded as a sequence of forms. Therefore, the objective of this research is to develop a system for supporting externalization of forms that characterize movement. Since drawing is regarded as one of the effective tools for understanding the target movement, a drawing tool is developed in which body form can be drawn by manipulating a skeleton model. This tool also monitors the drawing time and points out the body parts that took a long time to draw but are not externalized. In this paper, the developed drawing tool is introduced and the effect of the tool for understanding body movement in baseball batting is investigated through experiment.

Historical thinking is the type of thinking that learns lessons from past historical events and applies them to the modern world. In order to apply lessons, the future situation after the lessons have been applied should be inferred. The future situation has been affected by the causal relationships between people and between properties of the people. In this study, an “if thinking” learning method is introduced so as to understand such causal relationships. In this approach, the change of one historical element is given and its influence on other elements is asked as a question. To answer the question, consider various causal relationships between people and their properties must be considered. In this study, we have also developed a system for presenting “if” situations and judging learners’ answers automatically. The experimental result showed that our system was effective in acquiring causal relationships.

Design pattern is a description of the object-oriented design that gives high-quality and re-usable solutions for frequently occurring problems. A design pattern is formed based on the various experiences of predecessors who made ineffective designs. If students can grasp the design policy of predecessors from the design pattern, they can create good designs and apply them to new problems. The objective of this research is to propose a learning method for understanding design policy of the design pattern and to construct a meta-learning system for proposed learning method.

In collaborative learning, a discussion sometimes comes to a standstill because no comments have been made or no conflicting opinions have been offered. Activation remarks, which might solve such situations using past discussions, may be effective for similar situations. Our research group proposed a framework that applies the activation remarks of past discussions that were stored in a database to ongoing discussions based on case-based reasoning (CBR). To utilize past activation remarks, they should be modified to fit the current situations. We introduce a method for modifying selected activation remarks that contain situation-dependent words about the current discussion especially on remarks that contain words about the remaining time or topics. Our method grasps the time and the topics of ongoing discussions and creates activation remarks by replacing situation dependent words to words of ongoing discussion. Our experimental result showed that our proposed method created valid and effective activation remarks when appropriate past remarks were selected from the only one case-base.

The objective of our research is to develop a support system for creating presentation speech, especially speech that explains relations between two slides (complementary speech). Complementary speech is required between slides whose relations are difficult to understand from their contents, such as texts, figures, and tables. If authors could notice relations between created slides that are recognized by audiences, they would prepare appropriate complementary speech at the right places. To make authors notice slides where compl ementary speech is needed, our system analyzes relations between slides based on their texts and visualizes them. Four slide relations are defined and the method for detecting these relations from the slide texts is proposed. Then, analyzed relations are arranged in two-dimensional spaces that represent sequential relation and inclusive relation of their topics. The experimental results showed that most detected slide relations were the same as what examinees understood, and visualization of slide relations was useful in creating complementary speech.

When deciding commands, baseball coaches observe the current situation from various viewpoints, think of various criteria, and select commands/eliminate inappropriate commands. Whether they can arrive at the appropriate commands depends on the range of viewpoints and the number of criteria and commands that they consider. Usually, this process of deciding commands cannot be evaluated, since it is done in the mind and is not observed. The objective of this research is to develop a system by which a baseball coach's ability to decide on an appropriate command is improved by providing an environment for externalizing the decision process. In addition, a function for comparing the represented decision process with that of others is provided in order to allow the baseball coach to notice other effective decision processes previously unconsidered.

Design patterns are good designs in object-oriented programming and are generated experientially by predecessors. We propose a learning method of understanding design patterns by transforming a program with a design pattern into that without one (alternative solution). We also develop a support system that encourages learners of generating appropriate alternative solution. Experimental results proved that the proposed method was effective for a deep understanding of design patterns.

Mathematical exercises consist of several sub-exercises. When studying mathematics using an example exercise (example), some learners memorize all theorems used in the example, while others consider unknown derivation steps logically and memorize only new theorems. The latter learning method is effective, since the amount of memorization is small and learners can consider the reasons for applying newly appearing theorems. The aim of this research is to construct a learning environment that supports learners in generating sub-exercises from an example in order to foster logical thinking about mathematics. By finding known theorems from the example, learners are able to notice relations between exercises. In our environment, suggestions are provided if learners are not able to derive the sub-exercises. In addition, examples are given in the appropriate order to allow learners to easily notice the known theorems.

In collaborative learning in virtual learning environments, because of the restrictions of the communication means, grasping the learning situations of others is difficult. Learning activities taken in individual spaces, such as taking notes or investigating unknown topics, are especially important for grasping the understanding situations of others. In this paper, we propose an awareness support interface that provides actions in individual spaces as awareness information. By noticing other learners’ individual activities, smooth and effective communication is promoted. Learners do not need the awareness information of all other learners all the time. They may see the actions of others who may provide effective information for them. Effective learners can be detected by the roles in the discussion. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a method for estimating the roles of learners in discussions. Then based on the estimated roles, the learner’s focus for acquiring actions in individual spaces is detected.

In collaborative learning, learners discuss with other learners by exchanging their utterances. In order to represent effective utterances for knowledge acquisition timely, we propose a detection method of focusing utterances which are useful for understanding about their discussion. Focusing utterances are detected according to utterance types and understanding knowledge of learners. Focusing utterances are represented emphatically in the interface so as to distinguish them from normal utterances. Experimental result showed that our method could detect more than 60% of focusing utterances correctly.

In the collaborative learning environment, there are various kinds of information, such as faces of students and learning materials, and the interface which shows these information effectively is required. If the information is provided effectively, students would communicate with others smoothly and progress the learning efficiently. When we study in the group, we tend to focus on what we are interested in or what we thought to be important in order to get meaningful information efficiently. Therefore, our objective is to construct a user-oriented interface which reflects preferences or characteristics of individual students and only provides meaningful information for students. In this paper, the authors propose factors that are needed as the interface of collaborative learning in order to support effective and smooth learning. Then, they introduce the example of user-oriented interface in which students are able to focus on a particular student in the group during the discussion.