Using Emotions to Improve Role Taking in Storytelling Complex Learning Objects

The field of educational technology considers the research of new models as well as the experimentation of new methods as one of the greatest challenges for educational designers. How can educators reach the Millennial students and provide a productive and engaging learning environment? Guided learning activities, like digital storytelling, help learners bridge the gap between the real context and the learning theories. The aforementioned activities prepare students to learn in situations they may encounter at work and in their personal life. The construction of interactive narratives represents an educational challenge gaining in a considerable importance when they take into account the emotions felt by the users and exploit them to improve themselves. In this work, we propose to include the Emotion Management into a pedagogy-driven template, based on storytelling, and to extend the Storytelling Design Model through an Emotion Tracking Engine used to keep track of users' emotional states. Furthermore, a Story Logic Engine will be used to rebalance altered emotions and maximize the acquisition of knowledge, by assigning a different role to the student. Roles are selected by means of a mapping function that associates narrative archetypes with detected emotions.