Let's team up: Designing conversational agents as teammates

The success of projects is, amongst others, highly depended on the team members skillset and ability to collaborate. Hence, education has to undergo a change to keep up with the shift in the compositions of skills and knowledge needed for students. To overcome scalability issues, we propose to develop Timmy - a conversational agents (CAs) that acts as a team member. As there is a lack of concrete design knowledge concerning CAs as peers in teams, we conduct a design science research project. Based on requirements from scientific literature and expert interviews, we develop a concise set of design principles for designing CAs in peer roles in educational settings. Furthermore, we present an initial proof of concept evaluation. These insights will support researchers and practitioners to understand better how CAs can be systematically built to ameliorate the collaborative skill of students in teamwork settings.