A CULTURALLY CONTEXTUALIZED WEB BASED GAME

ENVIRONMENT TO SUPPORT MEANINGFUL LEARNING

Alexandre Mello Ferreira

, Eliane Nascimento Pereira

, Junia Coutinho Anacleto

Izaura Maria Carelli

Marcos Alexandre Rose Silva

and Ana Luiza Dias

Computer Department, Federal University of Sao Carlos, Rod Washington Luís, km 235, São Carlos/SP, Brazil

Education and Letters Centre, State University of West Parana

Av. Tarquinio J dos Santos, 1300, Foz do Iguacu/PR Brazil

Keywords: Common sense, Culture sensitive learning, Educational games, Sexual education, Pedagogical issues.

Abstract: The computer game use in education has been growing as a learning facilitator. What is it? educational

environment allows teachers to be co-author of an online game based on cards which uses a common sense

knowledge base. It also allows teachers to choose language according to their students’ culture and needs

providing them with suitable language. The environment also allows researchers to collect common sense

knowledge. Every user interaction in each editor’s module and player’s module generates a new common

sense statement which is stored into Brazilian Open Mind Common Sense (OMCS-BR) project knowledge

base. A study case was conducted with teachers and students from two different Brazilian public schools.

Results demonstrate there is a large potential of the use of this environment in real classes and the

methodology to collect common sense statements naturally through a web game.

1 INTRODUCTION

Nowadays many schools still have difficulty to use

the potential of computers for education. In Brazil

there are a lot of schools with computer laboratories

but they use them only in computer classes or they

simply do not use them. Most of schools do not use

computers for educational purpose, what could allow

teachers to enhance their educational practice, join

educational and entertainment aspects. Then, why

not to take the computational benefits at education?

In this context this paper described a way to

allow teachers to use the computer in their classes,

through a game. There are many educational games

available, such as: Word Puzzle

(www.marista.org.br/arquivos/jogos/85/forca.swf),

Secret Word (www.cubagames.com.br/), Crossword

Compiler (www.crossword-compiler.com/?lang=en)

but most of them have fixed issues, like content or

story. Nevertheless if teachers want to use these

games, they need to adapt their classes to the game

rules. In the game proposed here teachers are co-

authors because they can set up, adapt and evolve

the game content, according to their educational

goals. This game also supports teachers on teaching

the transversal themes defined on the Brazilian

curriculum: sexual education, ethics, healthcare,

environment, cultural diversity, market and

consumption (SEF, 1998).

Educational games are able to promote activities

that combine fun (playful activity) and seriousness

(well defined rules), once they are very popular

among children and teenagers. Nevertheless

according to Vygotsky (1987), Freire (1996) there

are pedagogical issues that should be considered for

stimulating the learning process. For example,

culture sensitive and contextualized learning

considering the student’s reality. Then, this game

proposes to consider the apprentices’ common sense

knowledge to promote their learning aiming at:

adopting a vocabulary that is familiar to the

students; instantiating content and clarifying myths,

beliefs and taboos that are cultural heritage.

Examples of this kind of knowledge related to

sexual education are: teenagers believe that girls

don’t get pregnant during their first sexual relation,

pill has to be taken on the day she is going to have a

sexual relation, and AIDS is a homosexual disease.

This kind of knowledge can be mapped into the

commonsense knowledge and can be clarified by

205

Ferreira A., Pereira E., Coutinho Anacleto J., Carelli I., Rose Silva M. and Dias A. (2009).

A CULTURALLY CONTEXTUALIZED WEB BASED GAME ENVIRONMENT TO SUPPORT MEANINGFUL LEARNING.

In Proceedings of the First International Conference on Computer Supported Education, pages 205-210

DOI: 10.5220/0001967302050210

 SciTePress

teachers during classes. The game called “What is

it?” (“O que é, O que é?” in Portuguese) aims at

helping players to infer a certain secret word related

to a certain transversal theme considering a set of

clues presented one at a time. The clues are

previously defined by the teacher having a common

sense knowledge base as a support on reaching such

goal.

This paper is structured as follow: section 2

explains the relation between commonsense

knowledge and education; section 3 presents the

“What is it?” game prototype; section 4 describes

the evaluation; section 5 discussion the results

obtained; section 6 draw some conclusions and

propose suggestions for some future works on

related topics.

2 COMMON SENSE

KNOWLEDGE & EDUCATION

The Brazilian Open Mind Common Sense Project

(OMCS-Br) is a Portuguese version developed by

Advanced Interaction Laboratory (LIA) at Federal

University of Sao Carlos (UFSCar) from the original

English project created by MediaLab of

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in

2000 (Anacleto et al., 2006).

Available over the Internet since August 2005 at

http://www.sensocomum.ufscar.br the project aims

to create a common sense knowledge base through

volunteers’ contribution. Any person can contribute

with the project, after fulfilling a small form with

information, such as: gender, day of birth, city and

others.

To collect common sense knowledge, volunteers

have to complete some semi-structured statements in

natural language in templates. Each template is

related to one activity and composed by three

different parts: (I) a fixed part which is changed

according to activity; (II) a dynamic part which is

filled out by a feedback process that uses parts of the

statements already stored; and (III) free field, where

the user write their piece of knowledge creating a

complete statement. Nowadays there are 20

activities about general topics and 6 specific themes

(children’s universe, colors and objects, colors and

emotions, popular beliefs, sexuality and healthcare).

All knowledge typed by volunteers in natural

language are processed to create a semantic network,

in which, the knowledge is represented as binary

relations. This representation, called ConceptNetBr,

is formed by four text files which have the relation

name, the two concepts, the frequency that this

relation was created by an extraction rule, the

frequency that this relation was created by an

inference rule, and at least the identification of this

relation in the table entries, where all statements are

stored before have been processed.

Common sense is defined here as knowledge that

most people agree within a certain community at a

certain period of time related to human experiences,

knowledge about social, physical, space, time and

psychological aspects of our daily life (Liu et al.,

2004). Recent researches (Anacleto et al., 2008)

have shown that automatically collected common

sense knowledge can be used to culturally map a

certain group of people. The importance of the

common sense and cultural knowledge to support

the learning process is referred by a number of

pedagogy researchers. Vygotsky (1987) believes that

the individual’s mind model can be understood only

if the social and cultural processes are considered in

his/her context. Paulo Freire (1996) cites that it is

necessary to respect knowledge that students already

reached when they start at school. Knowledge is

acquired in the social relations they participate in

their community. According to Freire, teacher

should “discuss with students the origin of some of

this knowledge considering the content is being

presented”. Such knowledge can help in

contextualizing learning process according to the

student’s reality, which is Freire considers extremely

important. Besides, the use of common sense

knowledge provides teachers an adequate

vocabulary to contextualize and discuss subjects

with learners from a certain community (Carvalho et

al., 2007). Common sense knowledge also can be

taken into account in teaching the called transversal

themes from the official school curriculum, defined

by the Brazilian Education Secretary, considering

that “the commitment on constructing citizenship

which demands a pedagogical approach to reach the

comprehension on the social reality, the rights and

responsibilities related to the personal and

collective life, which leads to the political

engagement” (SEF, 1998).

3 THE “WHAT IS IT?” GAME

The ongoing research aims to make possible the use

of common sense knowledge in web educational

games, stimulating the introduction, reinforcement

and construction of knowledge in the learning

process. It also aims at collecting common sense

knowledge from whom use the game. The

environment is divided in two main modules. The

player’s module is a quiz game where users should

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206

find out a secret word considering common sense

clues given in the game. The game editor’s module

is used to set up a new game.

“What is it?” has the differential in considering

the players’ profile, concerning the games presented

in the previous section. Since the players have to

subscribe themselves in the system before starting to

use it, the new statements collected in the interaction

can be related to their profile. Taking into account

the players’ profile collected is especially important

for the culture sensitive approach necessary in

developing applications for specific groups in a

certain region and age, considering their context. In

this case, the common sense knowledge can be

filtered and the application’s designer can consider

only knowledge collected from a desired profile in

order to contextualize it to the target group.

Figure 1: The player’s module main interface.

Figure 1 presents the player’s module main

interface. To illustrate the game’s use, it was

developed a game’s instance considering the theme

“Sexual Education”. To start the game the player has

to click on the dice, represented by the orange letter

“C”, whose faces represent topics previously

selected during the game edition. Each topic is

associated to a letter (see Figure 1, “C” is associated

with the topic “Contraceptive Methods”) and they

are randomly presented, in this way, the player can

be in touch with different topics at the same game.

For each topic is defined a group of cards and each

card has one or more secret words (synonyms).

These cards are composed by up to ten clues, which

can be extracted from common sense base according

to the purpose considered by who has setting up the

game. After selecting the topic, the player needs to

find out the secret word. To reach their goal, they

can select clues clicking on the clue numbers in

“Group of clues” and visualizing them at the “Clue

balloon”. After guessing the word, the player can

continue, either select another topic clicking on the

dice and continue playing, or close the game.

As the player tries to find out the secret word,

the system collects common sense knowledge

storing the relation between the word typed by the

player and the clues that were already displayed.

This collecting process is interesting (a) to teachers,

who can identify possible misunderstanding by

analyzing the answers, and therefore, approach those

misunderstandings in classroom to clarify them; and

(b) to the OMCS-Br knowledge base, which will

increase the number of common sense statements.

For example, when the player tries the word

“condom” after he/she had clicked on three clues, as

it is shown in Figure 1; three new relations are

created by mapping each displayed clue with the

word typed by the player through the relation

ConceptuallyRelatedTo. Thus, one of these three

relations is: (ConceptuallyRelatedTo, “it’s used to

prevent pregnancy and transmission of STD”,

“condom”).

The game’s editor module is a seven-step wizard

which guides the teacher to create new game’s

instances, which fit to their pedagogical goals. This

module is supported by the common sense

knowledge stored in the OMCS-Br knowledge base.

In this way, to create a new game’s instance, the

teacher must define four items: (1) the target group

profile which will be considered during the filter

process (2) the game’s main theme, which should be

chosen from the six transversal themes available; (3)

the topics, which are specific subjects related to the

transversal theme chosen in order to compose the

game dice sides; (4) the cards, which have a secret

word related to one of topics defined, an optional

secret word’s synonym list, and a group of up to ten

clues.

Figure 2: The editor’s module.

After the teacher has defined the secret word and

the possible synonyms for each card, he/she must

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207

define the clues – at least, one clue for each card. A

list of suggested clues is shown came from the

common sense knowledge base. To map the binary

relations at ConceptNet into these clues the game

editor combines some API functions, available to

communicate with the ConceptNet. For instance, the

relation (UsedFor, “prevent pregnancy and

transmission of STD”, “condom”) will be the clue

“It’s used for prevent pregnancy and transmission of

STD” depicted in Figure 2. Besides that, each clue

suggested can be modified before selected or new

clues can be added. It is important to highlight the

fail-soft approach adopted, i.e., the statements

suggested to teachers can be valid or not (Lieberman

et al., 2007).

Even as the player’s module, the editor’s module

also has some engines to collect common sense

statements from teachers to OMCS-Br Project.

There are seventeen rules to map the user interaction

into new statements, and then, new relations in the

ConceptNet. For example, when the word “Johnny”

as included as a synonym for “condom” one new

statement is created “Another way to say condom is

Johnny”, which will be at ConceptNet, the relation

(DefinedAs, “Johnny”, “condom”).

4 EVALUATION

To evaluate“What is it?” environment with students

and teachers, a study case was conducted in two

Brazilian public schools. It was analyzed

information about use and collect knowledge

process, use facilities and some information

regarding to use of computer educational games in

schools. We got in touch with schools from two

cities, one in São Carlos/SP and another in Foz do

Iguaçu/PR. Some characteristics of the participants

are depicted in table 1.

Table 1: Evaluation participants.

ÃO CARLOS FOZ DO IGUAÇU

TEACHERS

2 4

STUDENTS

4 5

AGE

UNTIL 11 BETWEEN 12 TO 15

GRADE

IFTH SEVENTH

Teachers were asked to create a new instance of

the game, choosing any of the themes and topics.

They used the system for approximately 40 minutes

to set up the instance with 2 cards on average. The

themes used in these settings were: environment (3

times), healthcare (twice) and sexual education

(once). After completion of the new configuration

for the game, not even being asked, all teachers

themselves wanted to play the newly created

instance of the game.

For the students’ interaction, the teachers created

two interesting instance about healthcare and sexual

education and made it available to the students of

Foz do Iguaçu and São Carlos respectively. Each

player used the environment for about 50 minutes,

playing an average of 7 cards.

The methods used to collect data were: direct

observation, questionnaires, notes and indirect

observation; the latter was obtained through the data

stored during interaction between users and system.

There were two questionnaires: (I) pre-session, its

objective is identify teachers and students profiles;

(II) post-session, for teachers about the use of

common sense knowledge support, and for students

related to use of the game considering the common

sense information.

Both post-session questionnaires were inspired at

QUIS™ (http://lap.umd.edu/QUIS/).The satisfaction

scale was modified to make it easy to the young

students; moreover, it is easier to teachers and

students to say that the game was very easy to play

rather than it was five, for example. Hence, an

adjective ranging from a higher to a lower degree

was defined based on Likert scale of 5 points, in

which “Very hard” represent one point and “Very

easy” five points (Evans, 2008; Wainer, 2007). As

the students’ module stores all the players’

interaction, teachers could observe their attempt; the

clues presented to them and their answers.

Before starting the evaluation we defined some

predictions about the “What is it?”environment

regarding to our expectations.

P1: The suggestions of clues coming from the

common sense knowledge base help the teacher to

create their cards: We believe that the common

sense knowledge can provide to the teacher what

their students are thinking about something, and

therefore help them to direct their class in a better

way, as some renowned authors in the educational

field say (Carvalho et al., 2007; Freinet, 1993;

Freire, 1996; Papert, 1985).

P2: The language used in the game’s content is

familiar to the student: As the common sense

knowledge base provides to the teachers what the

students know about something we expected that the

type of language used in the game should be familiar

to them. According to what was mentioned in

previous sections, it can provide a better educational

environment for students promoting the new

knowledge retention.

P3: A lot of common sense statements can be

collected in an easy way: As mentioned before, the

“What is it?” environment is also used to collect new

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common sense statements from the user interaction.

Some rules are used to catch concepts among the

user interaction, and to create new common sense

statements, which will be part of the knowledge

base. We hope with this approach, a faster increase

of the common base knowledge base size.

5 RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

Regarding to the editor’s module, in the pos-

questionnaire there were three questions related to

prediction 1 (P1) and in almost all of them the

teachers said that the support from common sense

knowledge base were helpful and relevant.

Nevertheless, only one teacher from São Carlos said

that this support was unhelpful or irrelevant, saying

“I thought very unproductive have to read a huge list

of clues with many phrases without accordance” and

“It is hard to find a clue that fit well to the secret

word”.

Table 2: Teachers’ interaction.

TEACHER THEME TOPICS CARDS STATEMENTS

A SEX EDUCATION 2 2 52

B ENVIRONMENT 1 3 83

C HEALTH 1 2 80

D ENVIRONMENT 1 1 38

E ENVIRONMENT 1 1 34

F HEALTH 3 6 253

An overview about the information stored

regarding to the teachers interaction is given in

Table 2, which the columns refer to: (a) the teacher,

represented by a letter; (b) the main theme game; (c)

the number of topics used; (d) the number of cards

created; and (e) the number of new statements

generated by the system. It is easy to realize the high

number of new common sense statements created

(90 on average) through small instances (2,5 cards

on average), pointing out the capacity to insert new

statements without a huge effort by the user.

Likewise the teachers, the students answered a

questionnaire after used the system, in which the

questions were about the system aspects and the

cards content. From 36 responses received, 26 of

them were that they found something known;

however, one student from Foz do Iguaçu had many

problems to understand the clues and then, many

difficulties to discover the secret word. Otherwise,

this student was the only one who did not realize

anything common to him. The graph on Figure 3

presents the average of student’s responses for the

prediction 2 (P2).

3.75

3.25

3.5

2.5

3.25

3.75

3.5

Student 1 Student 2 Student 3 Student 4 Student 5 Student 6 Student 7 Student 8 Student 9

Figure 3: Average of students’ responses ref. P2.

All students’ interactions were stored to be used

to create new statements in OMCS-Br knowledge

base. Table 3 depicts some information collected

from each student such as: the game theme played,

the number of cards played, the total number of tries

to guess secret word and the number of new

statements created. These new statements are

combinations between the words typed by player

and each clue requested, i.e., new statements are

directly related to the number of tries and the

number of clues requested.

Table 3: Students’ interaction.

STUDENT THEME CARDS TRIES STATEMENTS

1 HEALTH 3 4 15

2 HEALTH 5 7 23

3 HEALTH 5 5 20

4 HEALTH 5 8 26

5 HEALTH 2 3 10

6 SEX EDUC 11 13 94

7 SEX EDUC 8 17 145

8 SEX EDUC 8 10 153

9 SEX EDUC 7 12 121

On the Table 3, the first 5 students (Health

theme) were from Foz do Iguaçu and the others

(Sexual Education theme) were from São Carlos.

We noticed a substantial difference between both

cities which be explained through the total number

of cards within each game, and due to some specific

improvements at the collect process of Sexually

Transmitted Disease (STD) topic.

The results presented highlight that “What is

it?” environment provides extra benefits beyond a

simple educational game. The teacher’s possibility

to be the co-author of the game content and, added

to that, a contextualized support during this process

through a common sense knowledge base is a great

feature well accepted by teachers.

Being specific to P1 our experiment show that,

except for one teacher, the suggestions from the

common sense knowledge base were useful to create

the game content in anyway. The critics made by

this teacher can be interpreted in two different ways:

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209

(I) due to common sense knowledge base content is

created by anyone who access the project site, there

are many concepts that do not make sense or that are

scientifically wrong. It is a teachers’ decision how

they could work with this information; (II) the

process to create the clue has some problems and

can be improved in order to create better sentences.

Thinking on the latter interpretation, we are working

on with a natural language processing research

group to advance this functionality. Concerning to

P2, the majority of students said that they found

something familiar to them. Of course this not

means that it was happened only because of the

common sense knowledge support, however, as this

support was used by the teachers (mentioned

before), we believe that it should helped to achieve

this goal. Nevertheless, the student number 5 said

the opposite, pointing out that this strategy can be

used only to cover the majority people knowledge.

We may conclude that P2 was partially confirmed,

and we don’t have guarantee that the common sense

knowledge provided will be known for each student

in the group.

The environment also explores a new

methodology to collect common sense statements to

expand OMCS-Br knowledge base, which was

proved to be very efficient – prediction 3. For

example, using six game instances within 2.5 cards

on average each, 540 new statements into

knowledge base were produced. Therefore, as more

game will be created in “What is it?” environment,

more statements will be collected from the players.

6 CONCLUSIONS\FUTURE

WORK

“What is it?” educational game environment aims at

allowing teachers to configure and/or adapt the game

according to their pedagogical goals. Through this

game teachers can work on the transversal themes

proposed by the Brazilian Ministry of Education,

concerning to the students’ context and culture

through common sense knowledge usage, and

promoting a way of learning with fun. As it was

discussed in section 2, the adoption of common

sense based approaches for education is defended by

educators such as Freire (1996) and Freinet (1993).

As the design of the interaction considers students’

background and culture, it can motivate learners to

play since information presented has meaning to

them, engaged them in playing and learning. This

research also explores a new way to collect common

sense statements to enrich the OMCS-Br knowledge

base. To keep the knowledge base quality, we are

planning to adapt a spellchecker to validate the

sentences generated by the environment before to

send it to the OMCS-Br base, avoiding misspelled

sentences.

Exploring some web features, this environment

can also be incorporated into a Learning

Management System that promotes e-learning, like

Tidia-Ae, Sakai, Moodle or ATutor.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We thank FAPESP, CAPES and PTI for financial

support.

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