Pedagogy-Driven Smart Games for Primary School Children% - 2nd International Workshop on Evidence-Based Technology Enhanced Learning - page 35

adequate for each learner profile, and that the learner should be guided through the
material and tasks so as to achieve the learning goal.
The goal of this research is to enhance the reading comprehension of poor
comprehenders. In order to do so, TERENCE system has being developed follow-
ing the evidence-based design (EBD) and UCD [16], by involving a relevant
number of real learners in the project and educators as is depicted in Fig. 1.
Fig. 1 The UCD and EBD design process of the TERENCE smart games
Data have been collected and analysed through user centred design methods, and
then filtered through evidence-based sieves. The strategies of the educators can be
framed in the three stages of the hermeneutic cycle explained in [20]. In particular,
the explanatory stage can be broken down into the following reading interven-
tions, done in class, mainly using question-answering and drawing:
1. the entire text is discussed with the learners, analysing the vocabulary unknown
to the learners and paraphrasing the text;
2. the story is broken down into a sequence of episodes, if possible referring to the
story grammar, that is, the story setting, the initiating episode, the culminating
episode, the resolving episode, and the final episode;
3. finally, the time, the space and the characters of the story episodes are analysed
together.
All the aforementioned interventions were considered for writing the requirements
for the TERENCE game design. Constraints of the project triggered a prioritisa-
tion of the requirements which led in that visual aids were selected mainly for
their expected efficacy for the pedagogy plan, according to the available empirical
evidence: they should guide the child to better recall and correlate the information
acquired reading the story via adequate visual representations. The effective inter-
ventions relevant for the TERENCE design have thus been hierarchically orga-
nised in levels according to their main pedagogical goal:
1. time: interventions for reasoning about temporal relations between events of
the story, purely sequential (before-after) or not (all the others);