Pedagogy-Driven Smart Games for Primary School Children% - 2nd International Workshop on Evidence-Based Technology Enhanced Learning - page 33

Pedagogy-Driven Smart Games for Primary
School Children %
Fernando De la Prieta, Tania Di Mascio, Ivana Marenzi, and Pierpaolo Vittorini
Abstract. TERENCE is an FP7 ICT European project, highly multi-disciplinary,
that is developing an adaptive learning system for supporting poor comprehenders
and their educators. Their learning materials are stories and games, explicitly de-
signed for classes of primary schools poor comprehenders, where classes were
created via an extensive analysis of the context of use and user requirements. The
games are specialised into smart games, which stimulate inference-making for sto-
ry comprehension, and relaxing games, which stimulate visual perception and
which train the interaction with devices (e.g., PC and tablet PC). In this paper we
focus on how we used the pedagogical underpinnings and the acquired require-
ments to design the games of the system.
Keywords: Formalizations of pedagogical theories, serious games, game frame-
works.
1 Introduction
More and more young children turn out to be poor (text) comprehenders: they
demonstrate text comprehension difficulties related to inference-making skills, de-
spite proficiency in word decoding and other low-level cognitive skills. Deep text