MeIPeAS: An Intelligent Virtual Tutor for Mexican Elementary Schoolchildren

Abstract

It is known that virtual tutors have a wide range of functionalities, which have been little exploited and applied in the educational field at the primary level. However, these functionalities allow to offer mechanisms of interaction with students through an interactive dialogue by using text to speech, and even more sophisticated, the recognition and understanding of natural language or speech. In this paper, a personalized virtual tutor for the primary education scenario in Mexico is presented. This virtual tutor is called Mexican Intelligent Pedagogical Agent for Schoolchildren (MeIPeAS) and was created to be used as a pedagogical support mechanism offering a unique attraction for current and future generations of schoolchildren in Mexico. The virtual tutor has been validated in practice in public primary schools of the municipalities of the State of Mexico in Mexico. This validation is to analyze the impact of the user experience from the obtained results having relevant information about the reinforcement of topics taught within the classroom.