ChatBlock: A Block-Based Chatbot Framework for Supporting Young Learners and the Classroom Authoring for Teachers

Chatbots have been used as a digital interactive learning tool in education. Designing a chatbot for young students has challenges in their capability to formulate sentences by typing. Teachers have a challenge to develop a chatbot for desired purposes as well as to suit their classes. This research...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Chutiporn Anutariya, Hathaichanok Chawmungkrung, Watanee Jearanaiwongkul, Teeradaj Racharak
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: MDPI AG 2024-12-01
Series:Technologies
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Online Access:https://www.mdpi.com/2227-7080/13/1/1
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Summary:Chatbots have been used as a digital interactive learning tool in education. Designing a chatbot for young students has challenges in their capability to formulate sentences by typing. Teachers have a challenge to develop a chatbot for desired purposes as well as to suit their classes. This research proposes a ChatBlock framework that provides ChatBlock Tutor and ChatBlock Classroom interfaces to serve the target users. ChatBlock Tutor is designed as a block-based interface to support young students to connect various types of blocks for creating sentences. The formulated block-based sentences are used to make a conversation with the chatbot. On the other hand, the ChatBlock Classroom is developed to support teachers in preparing customizable content for a classroom in various formats, i.e., Q&As, learning materials, exercises, and quizzes. Finally, the design and development of ChatBlock is discussed and two case studies in primary schools are elaborated. We conduct a preliminary evaluation with a selected primary school and report the lessons learned from our study.
ISSN:2227-7080