Mixing human and software agents: a case study

We describe a multiagent approach of the organisation of a collective activity within a pedagogical context. We consider pedagogical situations where students have to explicitly define the articulation of their collective work and then achieve the different tasks they have defined. Our objective is to support these students by taking some of these tasks in charge whilst making them work out such organisation features. For this purpose, we propose to consider that the group of students forms a multi agent system and to introduce software agents that can achieve some of the tasks within this group. This conducts students to tackle the problem in terms of human and software agent coordination. We present how this approach can be conceptualized and modelled using Engestrom's triangle and how task delegation can be used as a means to enable students to define the software agent's behaviour.