BLT’s agenda is to conduct basic and applied research in areas of speech, language and character animation technologies, and incorporate these advances into computer programs that improve learning and access to information. BLT has been awarded grants from the National Science Foundation and the Institute for Education Research to improve science learning and achievement by elementary school children through natural spoken dialogs with a virtual tutor. These projects aim to create and demonstrate the effectiveness of a new generation of intelligent tutoring systems that immerse students in multimodal and multimedia learning activities. The spoken dialogs and other learning activities are designed to make students think and reason about the things they see and do in classroom science investigations.