A student training to be a teacher “might feel a little bit funny for the first minute or two because they’re interacting with a computer screen, but because the avatars are so real in their behaviors, with their voices, and in their interactions, it seems very real,” Catherine Bradshaw of UVA’s Curry School of Education said. “What we want to do is help teachers practice these strategies so that they can use them more flexibly in a real-world setting.”