Pedagogy-Driven Smart Games for Primary School Children% - 2nd International Workshop on Evidence-Based Technology Enhanced Learning - page 37

To summarise, according to the experts of the stimulation plan, TERENCE should
not propose games concerning causes to children with very low reading compre-
hension skills, and should avoid games that are likely to be too unchallenging, like
who-questions and what-questions, with children with good reading comprehen-
sion skills. In the case of children with very low skills, too demanding games can
easily lead to frustration whereas, in the case of children with good skills, unchal-
lenging games can easily lead to boredom.
3 Characterisation of Learners for Playing Tasks
By using the UCD, we extensively and deeply analysed the context of use and the
learners´ requirements, thereby specifying classes of learners for the system. The
learning material and tasks of the system were designed for those classes of learn-
ers. The first part of this section outlines the type of data collected and analysed
for specifying the classes of users. The second part outlines the type of data col-
lected and analysed for designing the learning material and the learning tasks.
3.1 Classes of Learners
The specific goal of the project distinguishes the two classes (deaf and hearing
learners). These classes were refined on the basis of the results of the analysis of
data for the context of use and user requirements. Such data have been gathered
via a mix of expert-based method inquiries and user-based method inquiries. The
learners involved were about 300 in Italy and about 300 in the UK; the educators
involved were about 50 in Italy and about 30 in the UK. Learners are currently
represented by five classes in Italy and four classes in UK [14]. The most signifi-
cant features related to the characteristics of the users and considered for deriving
the TERENCE classes are biographical information, personality and usage of
technology. All the classes and the features used for deriving the TERENCE
classes were then specified using personas, which are explained in [2] [14].
3.2 Playing Tasks
All data for the game requirements have been gathered through UCD methods, the
results of which are reported in [18] as tasks. In particular, the data for relaxing
games are popular causal video games which is a video-game meant for casual
gamers who come across the game and can get into the gameplay almost imme-
diately. This means that the causal game has usually simple rules and usually it
can be played everywhere, anytime and with any device. The data for smart games
are mainly diverse reading strategies by pedagogy experts working as therapists
with poor comprehenders, cognitive psychologists or educators. The TERENCE
smart games were then layered into similar levels as the previous interventions,
that is, smart games at the entry level for reasoning about characters, games at the
intermediate level for time, and games at the top level concerning causality.