A game to support childrens´ expression and socialization considering their cultural background

Abstract

This paper describes Contexteller, a collaborative educational system for storytelling that supports teachers in configuring and adapting stories to match children's cultural background, by means of exploiting common sense knowledge. This game is meant to support teachers to interact with students with different social and cultural backgrounds, allowing her/him to create stories according to the students´ cultural reality, expressed in their common sense knowledge, and consequently enabling them to get interested in helping the development of the story. This cultural sensitive storytelling environment intends to promote a closer contact between teacher and students and among students themselves giving them a computer tool to help children to freely express their thoughts, desires and to support them to cooperative work with teachers what is desirable for their intellectual and cognitive development. Contextualization and the narrative are supported by the OMCS-Br common sense knowledge base, which gives to the teacher some resources to perform an activity according to the pedagogical goals

Allowing software developers to develop culture-sensitive applications by providing them the omcs-br cultural knowledgebase

“…Such project aims at building a knowledgebase of the Brazilian culture in a collaborative way, i.e., the database is created by Brazilians through the project's website. Once there is this database, the applications development is being expanded, becoming possible to use the user's own culture as requirement to build applications, making them more user friendly and easy to interact with, as stated by researchers since then in their published work [3,4,5]. However, nowadays the access to the data present in the OMCS-Br database is restricted to researchers responsible for the project, i.e., LIA's researchers.…”