Narrative-Based Interactive Learning Environments from Modelling Reasoning

Narrative and story telling has a long history of use in structuring, organising and communicating human experience. This paper describes a narrative based interactive intelligent learning environment which aims to elucidate practical reasoning using interactive emergent narratives that can be used in training novices in decision making. Its design is based on an approach to generating narrative from knowledge that has been modelled in specific decision/reasoning domains. The approach uses a narrative model that is guided partially by inference and contextual information contained in the particular knowledge representation used, the Generic/Actual argument model of structured reasoning. The approach is described with examples in the area of critical care nursing training and positive learning outcomes are reported. (Contains 3 tables and 7 figures.)