Pedagogy-Driven Smart Games for Primary School Children% - 2nd International Workshop on Evidence-Based Technology Enhanced Learning - page 36

2. causality: interventions concerning causal-temporal relations between events
of the story, namely, the cause of a given event (cause), the effect (effect), or
the cause- effect relations between two events (cause-effect);
3. characters: interventions concerning characters, namely, who is the agent of a
story event (who), what does a character in the story (what).
The context of use was thoughtfully analysed and specified for characterising the
users of TERENCE, and hence stirring the design of the entire system. In this
manner, the learning material and tasks were designed so as to be adequate to the
real TERENCE learners. TERENCE learning material is made of stories and
games for primary school children. Stories are organised in topics, and games are
distinguished into relaxing games, for relaxing the learners, and smart games, for
assessing and stimulating reading comprehension. Each story is related to a set of
c.a 2 relaxing games, and a set of c.a 15 smart games.
The EBD practice of the experts responsible for the pedagogical plan requires
three main learning tasks in relation to the learning material of the system: (i)
reading stories; (ii) playing with smart games for stimulating inference-making
about stories; and (iii) playing with relaxing games for relaxing and motivating the
learners. The pedagogical goal of relaxing games is to stimulate visuo-perceptual
skills [14], instead smart games are designed to stimulate the recall and the corre-
lation of the information acquired while reading a story.
Both smart and relaxing games are effective to provide a playful environment.
When learning takes place in a playful environment, learning involves the learner
actively and it increases his or her motivation and engagement. For this reason, an
accurate stimulation plan has been carefully designed according to various ex-
perts´ feedback. The experts, in view of their evidence-based experience with sti-
mulation plans for children, suggested to focus on specific types of stimuli, name-
ly, inference-making about events and their relations, in order to train the learners
on this within the stimulation plan. Given that inference-making is the specific fo-
cus of the project, interventions were related to inference making about stories,
and to deep text comprehension more in general.
The results of the stimulation plan setted specific requirements on the design of
the TERENCE smart games, related to Time, Accuracy and Level of difficulty. As
a result of these requirements, relaxing games and smart games have been de-
signed as follows:

• Relaxing games are modeled on familiar games and serve to make the stimula-

tion plan more appealing to the learner. Each type of relaxing game aims at
stimulating a type of visio-perceptual interaction used in smart games that the
TERENCE learners are unlikely to have [14]. Therefore, they relax and moti-
vate the learners to use the TERENCE system within the stimulation plan, after
or before playing with smart games.

• Smart games serve to guide the child to better recall and correlate the informa-

tion acquired reading the story. Moreover, according to the performances of the
learners over the smart games, the adaptive module can decide whether to move
the learner from one story level to another. Therefore smart games lay at the
core of the stimulation plan.