Zhi Zheng, Binglin Liu, Weihao Chen, Lan Luo, Yu Mei, Jie Cai, Chun Yu, Yuanchun Shi
In early mathematics, children learn abstract concepts through concrete representations, such as manipulating objects, drawing, and speaking. Learning with peers can enrich this process by exposing children to diverse strategies and enabling them to exchange ideas through interaction. We realized this potential with virtual peers in Peers4U, a multimodal learning system to enhance children's mathematical conceptual understanding. Virtual peers driven by LLMs are personalized to the learner's cognitive level and assigned multimodal solutions with inspectable processes. During learning, peers engage in mixed-initiative interactions by responding, initiating topics, and advancing discussions along a pedagogical progression. A user study with 22 children and two experts showed our learner-centered topic orchestration significantly outperformed a persona-centered baseline, and children spontaneously authored new artifacts to demonstrate inspired ideas or share their own strategies, producing significantly more solutions when grouped with more Leading Peers. We contribute design insights for multimodal, learner-centered virtual peer systems.
Daniel Zhang-Li, Joy Jia Yin Lim, Binglin Liu, Shangqing Tu, Zijun Yao, Hao Peng Tsinghua University, Tsinghua University, Jifan Yu, Haoxuan Li Tsinghua University 等 19 位作者
Project-Based Learning (PBL) is an important learning method that promotes understanding and acquiring practical skills through training learners through a project. However, effective PBL often requires sustained orchestration and collaboration, but existing LLM-based learning tools provide partial assistance without explicitly modeling these roles, and overly comprehensive help provided by LLM can reduce learner autonomy. We propose SimPBL, a multi-agent framework with an orchestrator agent that provides adaptive scaffolding from interaction logs and collaborator agents that support project work through boundary-aware collaboration. We conduct comprehensive evaluation to study the effectiveness of SimPBL, where we observe a 14% improvement in learner examination score. Results from extensive studies further highlights the ability of SimPBL to manage learning behavior and improve learning experience. Code and materials are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/SimPBL-D5B8.
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cs.CL · cs.MA
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表