SnatchBot - A great conversational agent for the classroom
Create intelligent chatbots to reinforce your learning scenario
What is it?
SnatchBot is a platform that takes the complexity out of creating a chatbot, the virtual agent that simulates a sequence of conversational interactions anticipated by its creator.
The platform offers a free plan that provides access to all the basic features.
How does it work?
Grégory Michnik, associate professor of SVT (Life and Earth Sciences) at L'Escaut High School, offers us on the site disciplinary of the academy of Lille, a video that describes how to create a very simple chatbot and that also allows to understand the basics to start.
N.B.: The YouTube channel SnatchBot France also features several explainer videos made by Lorcan Teichne, the feature writer for The Chatbot magazine team.
For what uses?
- Lucie Dhorne
Eurovia (VINCI) educational manager and founder of Creativ'ip, Lucie Dhorne gives us a few examples of educational uses of chatbots in training (to present a training program, in learning escape games - face-to-face or remote - to create a link and a presence throughout the game,...) as part of a podcast of Rendez-vous en terre digitale hosted by Olivier Bernaert and Clément Cahagne.
- Gregory Michnik
As part of the article "Integrating a conversational agent in an exploration game" available on the SVT academic website of Lille, Grégory Michnik describes how to create a chatbot that gives the illusion to a student of conversing with a fictitious character in a serious exploration game.
He explains that the interest of integrating a conversational agent into a serious game is to provide a greater degree of interaction for a student. This offers in particular, for Gregory Michnik, the possibility of guiding the player towards what is important, bringing him clarifications while keeping a freedom of exploration.
The author of the article, presents us as an example the serious game "La Ferme de la Pomme d'Or" that he realized and for which he created a conversational agent with the help of the SnatchBot tool. He then integrated this, via an iframe, into a Genially interface (see below).
The game features a character (Achilles) with the role of a farmer. The latter, through a conversation with the student-player, leads to explore certain parts of his farm in order to gather some useful information. It then tests the student on what he has discovered or understood.
Gregory Michnik concludes his article by writing that the chatbot is a powerful training tool that can be used in multiple ways and also a very flexible tool that offers the possibility of designing a deep scripting. He still wants to remind us, that it can in no way replace a real visit, nor the natural conversation with a real professional passionate about his job.
Bonus: If you want to know how to seamlessly integrate a conversational agent into a virtual tour made with Genially, I invite you to watch the video made by the author.
The Délégation Régionale au Numérique pour l'Education explains in its article "Chatbots in Education" how it can be useful to use a chatbot in education.
The educational contributions of a chatbot are multiple, it allows to :
Strengthen personalized feedback;
Strengthen student engagement by making them actors in their learning, as the scenario unfolds according to their responses;
Strengthen differentiation of learning;
Reinforce a pedagogy based on experience and learning by trial and error;
Reinforce student autonomy;
Reinforce pedagogical and social tutoring (learning, counseling, guidance,..) ;
Strengthen the personalization of student assessment.
My review of SnatchBot
SnatchBot is a platform that offers a simple interface to easily take ownership and design the creation of a chatbot, this virtual agent that simulates a sequence of conversational interactions anticipated by its creator. Although chatbots will never replace the teacher, they still offer a vast potential in education by proposing new learning modalities. It is also, to quote Gregory Michnik, a flexible tool that offers the possibility of deep scripting that can be enriched over time.
Now, it is important to keep in mind that using a chatbot for certain purposes requires time in development and design to achieve a "natural" conversational system. Because as the DRNE of Bourgogne-Franche-Comté so rightly reminds us, it requires a substantial amount of scripting work when the designer has to set up everything. It is therefore also a great opportunity to develop a team project by confronting the scenarios and having them tested.
Please note: I invite you to discover the excellent initiative by Radio-Canada's Decrypteurs with the goal of raising awareness among young Internet users about the fight against disinformation and helping them understand how fake news is spread with the help of a conversational robot that simulates a conversation related to the fifteen proposed themes.
If there is one area in which the Internet has transformed practices, it is that of consumption. Alongside e-commerce is indeed growing an alternative mode of consumption, which uses peer-to-peer networks and is based on the capital of trust between sellers and buyers.
Repeated attacks by the US government and other legislators have led us to fear the worst for all areas of science over the next few years. How does a society protect itself against such attacks? By restoring a special place to science, both among the general population and among young people.
The study points out differences between boys and girls in relation to sports linked to gender (and power) relations. Curious to discover the successful practices of teachers? Find out by reading Simone Cecilia Fernandes' thesis. Maybe you won't see children playing on a court the same way anymore.
In a society that prides itself on performance, isn't competition the reflection of a race against both oneself and others? What kind of performance are we talking about? Is it the one that pulls us upwards and makes us explore the best of ourselves, or is it the one that bends us under the yoke of systems of thought, driving us to exhaustion and sometimes forsaking our own aspirations along the way?
It's all we talk about, but the term "curation" refers to a wide variety of practices, not all of which have the same added value. A welcome blog post reminds us what quality curation is all about.