Interactive Simulation-Based Learning Tools for Training Children’s Helpline Counsellors

Abstract

Children around the world contact children’s helplines when facing emotional, social, or psychological difficulties. These helplines provide confidential support via phone or textbased conversations, where children can share concerns ranging from everyday worries to serious safety issues. Helplines rely on skilled volunteer counsellors who can empathise, structure conversations, and help children find solutions. These helplines train a large number of volunteer counsellors annually to keep up with the volume of conversations they receive. For example, De Kindertelefoon in the Netherlands handled on average around 900 conversations per day and trained 300 new volunteers in 2024. Traditional training methods, such as role-playing, are valuable but resource-intensive, time-consuming, and dependent on the availability of trainers. To address these challenges, interactive simulation-based agents offer a promising extension to existing training practices by enabling scalable, safe, and consistent training. Such agents can simulate a virtual child with whom trainees can practise counselling skills without involving real children. However, current solutions mainly focus on observable interaction behaviour, while paying less attention to clarifying the motivations underlying the child’s actions.

This thesis examines how interactive simulation-based learning tools can train counsellors at children’s helplines. Specifically, it investigates how simulation-based training that includes a virtual child agent can contribute to improved learning outcomes, realism, and educational value while remaining controllable and interpretable. To achieve this, we model more than surface-level dialogue in interactive agents, i.e., the virtual child. These agents should include representations of internal states and how these states change during interaction. One way to achieve this is through the Belief–Desire–Intention (BDI) model, which conceptualises human cognition: beliefs shape desires and guide actions, allowing cognition to be explicitly simulated. This explicitly simulates the internal states, enabling the training system to show not only what a virtual child says but also why their actions and behaviours change. In this work, we develop a training simulation in which a trainee counsels a virtual child contacting a helpline via a text-based interface. The research empirically evaluates combinations of cognitive modelling of a virtual child with educational design to support guided, interpretable, and effective learning experiences.