When people do an easy task, and another person is nearby, they tend to do that task better than when they are alone. Conversely, when people do a hard task, and another person is nearby, they tend to do that task less well than when they are alone. This phenomenon is referred to in the social psychology literature as "social facilitation" (the name derives from the "good" side of the effect). Different theories have been proposed to explain this effect. The present study investigated whether people respond to a virtual human the same way they do to a real human. Participants were given different tasks to do that varied in difficulty. The tasks involved anagrams, mazes, modular arithmetic, and the Tower of Hanoi. They did the tasks either alone, in the company of another person, or in the company of a virtual human on a computer screen. As with a human, virtual humans produced the social facilitation effect: for easy tasks, performance in the virtual human condition was better than in the alone condition, and for difficult tasks, performance in the virtual human condition was worse than in the alone condition. Implications for the design of instructional systems as well as other systems involving human-computer interactions are discussed.

In this PhD thesis, the utilisation of interactive simulation in a higher education e-learning classroom environment was explored and its effectiveness was experimentally evaluated by engaging university students in a classroom setting. Two case studies were carried out for the experimental evaluation of the proposed novel interactive simulation e-learning tool. In the first case study, the use of interactive agent-based simulation was demonstrated in teaching complex adaptive system concepts in the area of ecology to university students and its effectiveness was measured in a classroom environment. In a lab intervention using a novel interactive agent-based simulation (built in NetLogo). For the purpose of teaching complex adaptive systems such as the concept of spatially-explicit predator prey interaction to undergraduate and postgraduate students in the University of Stirling. The effectiveness of using the interactive simulation was investigated by using the NetLogo software and compared with non-interactive simulation built using R programming language. The experimental evaluation was carried out using a total of 38 students. Results of this case study demonstrates that the students found interactive agent-based simulation to be more engaging, effective and user friendly as compare to the non-interactive simulation. In the second case study, a novel interactive simulation game was developed (in NetLogo) and its effectiveness in teaching and learning of complex concepts in the field of marine ecology was demonstrated. This case study makes a twofold contribution. Firstly, the presentation of a novel interactive simulation game, developed specifically for use in undergraduate and postgraduate courses in the area of marine ecology. This novel interactive simulation game is designed to help learners to explore a mathematical model of fishery population growth and understand the principles for sustainable fisheries. Secondly, the comparison of two different methods of using the interactive simulation game within the classroom was investigated: learning from active exploration of the interactive simulation game compared with learning from an expert demonstration of the interactive simulation game. The case study demonstrated the effectiveness of learning from passive viewing of an expert demonstration of the interactive simulation game over learning from active exploration of the interactive simulation game without expert guidance, for teaching complex concepts sustainable fishery management. A mixed methods study design was used, using both quantitative and qualitative methods to compare the learning effectiveness of the two approaches, and the students’ preferences. The investigation was carried out by running interventions with a mixture of undergraduate and postgraduate students from the University of Stirling in a classroom environment. A total of 74 participants were recruited from undergraduate and postgraduate level for both case studies. This thesis demonstrated through two case studies effectiveness of the proposed novel interactive simulation in university e-learning classroom environment.