AI and Narrative Games for Education Daniela Romano and Paul Brna and Judy Robertson and Sandy Louchart 1. INTRODUCTION There is an increasing interest in the computer games industry in the development of games with emotionally compelling interactive stories. Games designers, screen writers and narrative theorists propose contrasting approaches to engineer satisfying stories in which players can participate for pure entertainment or educational purposes. Intelligent serious games for education are applications that use the power of AI and the characteristics of games to create educational engaging learning experiences. A game is a system in which a player/s can engage in an artificial challenge that results in a quantifiable outcome. The outcome of a serious game is the achievement of the learning goals set within a realistic context. This symposium focuses on the application of artificial intelligence techniques, frameworks and theories to the creation of interactive engaging narrative games for education. It will address questions such as: * How is believable story engineered through games? * What are the crucial elements of a believable story? * How can educational goals be achieved through narrative games? * How should the interaction between the player/s and the game take place? * How should the characters behave to achieve emotionally convincing stories? * How can we design interactive stories in which the player's experience is central? * How can we scale up prototype interactive narrative architectures to meet the requirements of today's game engines? Themes running throughout the symposium will be the extent to which game engines can be used as research tools and the appropriate methods for disseminating and sharing prototype systems throughout the community. 2. PARTICIPANTS We welcome researchers from academia, education and industry, in particular those involved with the design, development and evaluation of AI based narrative and games. Their expertise could be in a range of areas including: narrative, educational research, multimedia, game design and development, interaction design and evaluation for children and any other relevant area. 3. SUBMISSIONS Papers sought in the following areas, but are not limited to: * Interactive narrative and virtual storytelling * Applied AI in games and serious games * Believable synthetic agents for games or narrative * Agent strategy planning in a games or interactive narrative context * Educational/training applications * The use of games as test-beds for research Paper submissions should be no longer than 8 pages. The program committee will also review posters for work in progress. Please submit one A4 page as a poster submission. Please send an email with the relevant attachment to D.Romano@sheffield.ac.uk, with the title AISB SYMPOSIUM SUBMISSION. Receipt will be acknowledged by email within 7 days. 4. PUBLICATION All accepted papers will be published in the AISB proceedings produced for the conference. Best papers will be invited to submit to a Special Edition of the International Journal of AI in Education (Journal Editor: Paul Brna). Please note that such papers would be resubmitted and re-reviewed for the special issue using the normal standards for acceptance. Further details will be announced at the symposium. 5. FORMAT Papers submission to the symposium should follow the guidelines set by the AISB committee and can be found at the following URL: http://www.aisb.org.uk/convention/aisb07/index.html Files should be submitted as MS Word or PDF documents. 6. REVIEWING PROCESS Submissions will be judged on relevance to the symposium themes, originality, quality and clarity. Each paper will be reviewed by at least two referees. Authors are asked to take care not to identify themselves in their submissions, as the reviews will be anonymous. The reviewers will give the authors feedback on their papers.