SimPal: Towards a Meta-Conversational Framework to Understand Teacher's Instructional Goals for K-12 Physics

Abstract

Simulations are widely used to teach science in grade schools. These simulations are often augmented with a conversational artificial intelligence (AI) agent to provide real-time scaffolding support for students conducting experiments using the simulations. AI agents are highly tailored for each simulation, with a predesigned set of Instructional Goals (IGs), making it difficult for teachers to adjust IGs as the agent may no longer align with the revised IGs. Additionally, teachers are hesitant to adopt new third-party simulations for the same reasons. In this research, we introduce SimPal, a Large Language Model (LLM) based meta-conversational agent, to solve this misalignment issue between a pre-trained conversational AI agent and the constantly evolving pedagogy of instructors. Through natural conversation with SimPal, teachers first explain their desired IGs, based on which SimPal identifies a set of relevant physical variables and their relationships to create symbolic representations of the desired IGs. The symbolic representations can then be leveraged to design prompts for the original AI agent to yield better alignment with the desired IGs. We empirically evaluated SimPal using two LLMs, ChatGPT-3.5 and PaLM 2, on 63 Physics simulations from PhET and Golabz. Additionally, we examined the impact of different prompting techniques on LLM's performance by utilizing the TELeR taxonomy to identify relevant physical variables for the IGs. Our findings showed that SimPal can do this task with a high degree of accuracy when provided with a well-defined prompt.