Interactive Pedagogical Drama for Health Interventions

The goal of Interactive Pedagogical Drama (IPD) is to exploit the edifying power of story while promoting active learning. An IPD immerses the learner in an engaging, evocative story where she interacts with realistic characters. The learner makes decisions or takes actions on behalf of a character in the story, and sees the consequences of her decisions. The story's characters are realized by autonomous agents. We discuss IPD in the context of Carmen's Bright IDEAS (CBI), a multimedia title designed to teach problem solving skills to mother's of pediatric cancer patients. CBI was an exploratory arm of a clinical trial and here we discuss key creative and technical aspects of the design and results from that arm. The use of drama as a pedagogical tool is a constant across cultures and throughout history. In Poetics, Aristotle argued over two millennia ago that learning and drama are interwoven: that drama is an imitation of life and humans learn through enjoyment of that imitation. More recently, research in psychology has argued that narrative is central to how we understand the world and communicate that understanding (1). And of course, the engrossing, motivational nature of story is unmistakable; the world now consumes stories in various media with a "ravenous hunger" (10). Yet stories can also have a drawback from a learning perspective: they typically place the learner in the role of passive audience instead of active learner. The goal of Interactive Pedagogical Drama (IPD) is to exploit the edifying power of story while promoting active learning. An IPD immerses the learner in an engaging, evocative story where she interacts openly with realistic characters. The learner makes decisions or takes actions on behalf of a character in the story, and sees the consequences of her decisions. The learner identifies with and assumes responsibility for the characters in the story, while the control afforded to the learner enhances intrinsic motivation (7). Since the IPD framework allows for stories with multiple interacting characters, learning can be embedded in a social context (17). We take a very wide view of the potential applications of interactive story and IPD in particular. We envision interactive story as a means to teach social skills, to teach math and science, to further individual development, to provide health interventions, etc. In creating an IPD, the demands of creating a good story, achieving pedagogical goals and allowing user control, while maintaining high artistic standards, must all be balanced. To ensure a good story, dramatic tension, pacing and the integrity of story and character must be maintained. Pedagogical goals require the design of a pedagogically-appropriate "gaming" space with appropriate consequences for learner choices, scaffolding to help the learner when necessary and a style of play appropriate to the learner's skill and age. To provide for learner control, an interaction framework must be developed to allow the learner's interactions to impact story and the pedagogical goals. These various demands can be in conflict, for example, pedagogically appropriate consequences can conflict with dramatic tension and learner control can impact pacing and story integrity.