Playing for Improving the Reading Comprehension Skills of Primary School Poor Comprehenders

Abstract

TERENCE is an FP7 ICT European project , highly multidisciplinary, that is developing an adaptive learning system for supporting poor comprehenders and their educators. Its learning material are stories and games, explicitly designed for classes of primary schools poor comprehenders, where classes were created via an extensive analysis of the context of use and user requirements. Its learning tasks are reading stories and playing with games. The games are specialised into smart games, which stimulate inference-making for story comprehension, and relaxing games, which stimulate visual perception and which train the interaction with devices (e.g., PC and tablet PC). The design of the reading and playing tasks is mainly based on the requirements resulting from the study of the context of use, which is made via field studies and expert-based inquiries. In this paper we focus on how we used the pedagogical underpinnings and the acquired requirements to design the games of the system.