@inproceedings { ferreira20, abstract = {As climate change and biodiversity loss are threatening the natural world's equilibrium and survival, people's concerns about these topics have increased significantly. The work presented in this paper lies at the cross-section between the areas of education, biodiversity and technologies. More specifically, this project builds on research in virtual agents in educational settings to promote young children's engagement with a biodiversity curriculum. In this context, we conducted an observational study with 105 primary school's children with the goal of evaluating the effectiveness of a virtual robotic agent (presented through a multimedia application), in providing an effective and engaging learning experience about local biodiversity to children. Our results suggested that a) older children (8 to 10 years) knowledge about certain animals and plants from their local biodiversity is well matured; b) younger children (6 to 7 years) present more faithful conceptualisations about nature-related scenarios compared to older children and c) both young and older children exhibited a preference for nature-related scenarios when compared to human-made ones. Our findings provide useful information in favour of the usefulness of implementing user-adaptive learning systems, by considering factors like the children's previous level of knowledge. Besides, this personalised and interactive type of system might provide an essential advantage in learning scenarios, compared to ``static'' systems, in enhancing children's learning outcomes.}, address = {Cham}, booktitle = {Social Robotics}, keywords = {Intelligent Interactive Storytelling;Intelligent Virtual Agents;}, pages = {194--206}, publisher = {Springer International Publishing}, title = {Let's Learn Biodiversity with a Virtual `}, year = {2020}, author = {Maria José Ferreira and Raquel Oliveira and Sandra Câmara Olim and Valentina Nisi and Ana Paiva} }

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