What is age's affect in collaborative learning environments?

In educational environments, the learners' affective state is the subject of continuous research that seeks to create the most effective learning environment. This state has been shown to have a direct correlation on the learners' motivation and engagement, subsequently affecting their success or failure. This is consistent for both physical and virtual educational settings. In intelligent tutoring systems, embodied pedagogical agents have been used for the many benefits they provide including their affective influence. The agents are designed based on specific criterion including competency, gender, ethnicity or behavioural tendencies, to optimise their effect on a targeted audience. We developed a web-based collaborative learning application that supports simultaneous learner-to-virtual agent and learner-to-learner interactions. We conducted a study that investigated the influence of virtual agents' physical characteristics (attributes), specifically age, on learners' experience and its' influence on learning outcome. The results revealed that the age of virtual agents is an important factor that must be considered in virtual tutor design.