Conquering an exo-planet through the use of a virtual role playing game assisted by an emotionally intelligent pedagogical agent

In this paper, we present a serious role playing game that teaches STEM. Every role has been designed while keeping Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences and entry points in mind. From a technology point of view, the advances of our Serious Game are the way we use a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), as well as the use of Intelligent Pedagogical Agents (IPAs), which guides the learner trough the game. Players' emotions enter the loop performing sentiment analysis trough chat messages among team members and the IPA. From a pedagogical point of view, the main novelty is that the game follows an inquiry-based approach where the learner is encouraged to ask questions and create her own path to arrive to the solution of the assigned task. While in state-of-the-art games, the user usually interacts by choosing a sentence among a set of predefined possibilities, our system allows the user to freely express her thoughts in textual form and provides the user with an adequate answer. The role-playing game also offers the possibility to work in teams and develop meta competences such as adaptation and anticipation. © The Authors, 2016. All Rights Reserved.