THREE LITTLE PIGS DISCOVERING MATERIALS

A Software for the Sensitization of Primary School

Students to Environmental Themes

Marco Vannucci, Valentina Colla, Leonardo Bendinelli

Marco Colombini, Rachele Massei and Silvia Ciulli

PERCRO Lab., Scuola Superiore S.Anna, viale R.Piaggio, Pontedera, Italy

Keywords:

Materials recycling, Educational software, Interactive book, Games.

Abstract:

This paper describes a software suite aiming at the sensitization of children to environmental themes such as

materials use and recycling. The software, in the form of an interactive book, by means of the famous ”‘Three

little pigs”’ story introduces the handled themes which are treated more in detail through some knowledge

improvement scenes extending the main story. The suite is completed by some games which verify the users

understanding of the treated themes. The developed software is usable both as a stand alone software both via

Internet embedded in a web page. Tests of the suite have been performed on a group of primary school students

and proved the efﬁciency of the software, its high interactivity level and an encouraging comprehension of the

treated themes by the users and suggested the authors the future developments.

1 INTRODUCTION

The current world situation in terms of environment

is critical. Energy use, resources consumption and

pollution represent key issues which will affect life

quality in the present and in the future years. For

this reason it is clear that for a responsible devel-

opment the world has not only to operate in the di-

rection of the elaboration and improvement of new

and more sustainable technologies in order to inter-

vene directly on such problems but also in the direc-

tion of making people aware of environmental prob-

lems. Even more so, it appears important the aware-

ness of young children to this kind of problems. For

this purpose a software suite for the sensitization of

primary school students to subjects such as material

use, recycling and energy saving was developed as

these aspects will play a key role for the environmen-

tal impact. In the last three decades educational soft-

ware production increased year by year together with

its importance, exploiting each time more soﬁsticated

technologies which allowed the development of ever

more capturing software (Johnson, 2003). The story

of educational software starts in the early sixties with

the production of lean softwares without multimedia

and interaction with the user and continues up to to-

day characterized by many tools rich of fascinating

3D graphics, sounds effectsand a higher levelof inter-

activity. The whole scenery of educational software

is very complex and can be classiﬁed on the basis of

its contents and methods: from the common tools for

children’s home learning to more complex packages

suitable to the use in the classrooms under the con-

trol of a teacher or to the so called edutaintment in

which the main characterizing element is the enter-

tainment and the educational part plays a secondary

role. Technology improvementsplayed a primary role

in the development of educational software (Khalifa

et al., 2000) making possible the use of multimedia

resources and interactivity which are fundamental for

the success of this tools (Straker and Govier, 1996) as

in the modern world children have to be stimulated to

the learning through educational software otherwise

their attention will be kept by other kinds of media

such as television or gaming consoles, less interesting

from the strictly educational point of view, but more

captivating. In the recent years educational software

and the introduction of computer to the schools were

proved to accelerate children’s learning process (Con-

treras, 2002) and by consequence a multitude of edu-

cational software was developed for several purposes:

mathematics, history, foreign languages, geography,

music, religion, physical education and many others.

A list containing a reviewof most representativeprod-

ucts categorized by subject area can be found in (Dig-

267

Vannucci M., Colla V., Bendinelli L., Colombini M., Massei R. and Ciulli S. (2009).

THREE LITTLE PIGS DISCOVERING MATERIALS - A Software for the Sensitization of Primary School Students to Environmental Themes.

In Proceedings of the First International Conference on Computer Supported Education, pages 267-272

DOI: 10.5220/0001961502670272

 SciTePress

ital resources guide, 2005). In the complex scenery of

educational software, due to the aggravation of world

environmental situation, speciﬁc environmental edu-

cation software and books appeared in order to dis-

seminate to a large public the main concepts on the

basis of sustainable development. Some of these tools

are addressed to children but, due to the handled top-

ics and to the level of inspection, many others are ad-

dressed to mature users.

This paper presents an educational software in the

form of a living book addressed to young children

aiming to their sensitization to the correct use of most

common materials. This paper is organized as fol-

lows: a general description of the complete software

is depicted in section 2 then sections 3, 4 and 5 de-

scribes the parts the suite can be divided in on the

basis of the teaching approach. Some considerations

on the testing of the tool on a group of primary school

students and some remarks on the future perspective

of the suite are discussed in section 6.

2 THE SOFTWARE SUITE

The developed software consists of an interacting set

of tools for the sensitization of primary school chil-

dren to topics related to the environment such as the

correct use of materials and their recycling. Such

subtopics were chosen among the others because they

are nowadays very common and not completely un-

known to the target public; moreover they are consid-

ered very important for the future preservation of the

environment. The target users the educational soft-

ware is addressed to and the handled subjects imposed

some tricks on several aspects of the product. In par-

ticular the age of the public required the software to

be continuously snappy and able to keep as high as

possible the attention of the young users. Moreover it

was decided to give the users the possibility of learn-

ing what they want by selecting particular topics or

to deepen the concepts they are interested in. Finally

there was the necessity to monitor the actual learning

of the treated concepts by the user in order to eval-

uate the effectiveness of the software. Beside these

methodological issues there were also technical as-

pects which have been considered: the portability of

the software in order to make it usable on various OS

platforms; its accessibility from the web and modu-

larity in order to allow an easy addition and update

of new parts in the future. The basic idea of the suite

was thus to create a software handling the above men-

tioned environmental issues by exploiting the frame-

work of a well known fairytale opportunely modiﬁed

in order to add the desired contents. The educational

software consists of an interactive animation similar

to a living book.

The story which was chosen to be represented is

the famous novel Three little pigs (Jacobs, 1890), a

fairy tale featuring animals published for the ﬁrst time

in the late 18th century although the story is thought

to be much older. This particular story was cho-

sen because it was considered very appropriate to the

treated topics as the original story is already oriented

to themes such as materials as it tells the adventures

of three little pigs defending from a ravenous wolf by

building their dens once in reed, then in wood and ﬁ-

nally with bricks experimenting that way the features

of these materials. Both the technical and method-

ological organisation of the suite reﬂect the standard

methods utilized for the development of educational

software (Barbosa, Maldonado, 2006) which aim to

the creation of efﬁcient tools in terms of teaching ca-

pabilities. The developed tool is logically divided into

three parts in which the user can freely move as shown

in ﬁgure 1. These three parts combine entertaining

elements, games and information which are acknowl-

edged to be the backbone of an efﬁcient educational

software (Jovanovic, Starcevic, Stavljanin, Minovic,

2008). Giving the user the freedom of passing ar-

bitrarily from one scene to another is a method for

keeping high the interest of the user by letting him

decide what to see and what to learn (Finlayson and

Cook, 1998). Each part was designed in order to meet

the requirements mentioned in this section:

The main story in this part of the suite the main

story of the Three little pigs is told by means of

interactive animations. Beside the story, many in-

formations concerning the materials employed by

the little pigs are passed to the user. This part is

described in detail in section 3.

The knowledge improvements in this sections main

informations about materials, their use and their

recycling process are reported together with sim-

ple quizzes and other curiosities on the treated

themes. This part is described in detail in section

The games some well-known games have been real-

ized in order to verify in a funny way the learning

of the concepts and to entertain the young users.

This part is described in detail in section 5.

In order to meet the technical requirements it was de-

cided to develop the main story and the knowledge

improvement part as a Flash animation which allows

various interactions with the user, is familiar to chil-

dren as many web pages already use such technology

and can be either part of a stand alone executable soft-

ware or embedded in an HTML page. On the other

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268

Figure 1: A scheme of the parts composing the suite and the

connections among them.

hand games were implemented by using the Java pro-

gramming language which grants the portability of

the software which is a key issue for a wide use of the

software (Beynon and Mackay, 1993) (OECD, 1987).

3 THE MAIN STORY

The accountof the story of Three little pigs is the main

part of the whole suite from which it is possible to

reach the other parts of the software. The original

story is related faithfully and is used as a pretext to

discuss the desired environmental issues thanks to the

additions of several considerations as, for instance, on

the materials employed by men for building houses

or to perform some common works. For the devel-

opment of the Flash animation used for the represen-

tation of the story the commercial software Macro-

media Flash MX was employed. Such software is

the standard professional tool for the creation of in-

teractive animations consisting of graphic elements,

texts and web applications and allows the publication

of created animations on a web page integrated in a

HTML form.

In the design of story scenes several considera-

tions for the improvement of their appearance were

applied:

• for the choice of colors and settings of the novel,

vivid pastel colors were preferred to realistic ones.

Pastel colors are more familiar to children as they

are used in cartoons

• the language used in dialogs and narration is very

simple and as similar as possible to comics style,

moreover typical comics baloons are used for the

dialogs among characters

• several hidden animations have been put into the

scenes.

Interactivity and animations are very important in

the scenes. For the realization of such aspects a tool

named ActionScript available within the Macromedia

package was used.

The main story consists of 35 scenes telling the

story of the Three little pigs and focusing on mate-

rials themes by means of some added scenes or ele-

ments. During the representation of a scene it is pos-

sible to interact with some of its elements. When a

scene ends, it will be possible for the user to move

to the next or previous scene or, if available, to enter

a scene containing some knowledge improvement as

shown in ﬁgure 2

Figure 2: A sample scene of the story where links to previ-

ous and following scenes can be seen as well as the high-

lighted link to the steel knowledge improvement.

The story includes music and sound effects. Both

the narration and the dialog among the characters are

written and read so as to allow the use of the soft-

ware to those children who are still not able of read-

ing. Currently the software supports Italian and En-

glish language but the possibility of adding further

languages is fully supported.

4 THE EXTRA CONTENTS

In addition to the story, some special contents for im-

proving the knowledge of interested users on mate-

rial themes were added. The framework of the story

in this sense works as a starting point for more de-

tailed information on a speciﬁc set of topics. In facts

from some story scenes it is possible to jump to other

scenes where materials features are described more

in detail by pressing a button or interacting with a

character as seen in ﬁgure 2. The presence of these

links on the scenes are supposed to prompt the chil-

dren to know something more on the topics the par-

ticular scene is related to. These extended contents

have been realized by means of ﬂash animated scenes

as it was done for the main story. Nevertheless these

scenes are characterized by a higher level of interac-

tivity as it is needed for an active involvement of the

THREE LITTLE PIGS DISCOVERING MATERIALS - A Software for the Sensitization of Primary School Students to

Environmental Themes

269

child in the teaching process . The considered materi-

als at this stage are: wood, concrete, steel, plastic and

glass. For each of them the following aspects have

been treated :

Story the story of the material, its discovery and ﬁrst

use and some other curious information

Use the way the material can be used, highlighting its

main features and the reason of each speciﬁc em-

ployment with manyexamples from the real world

Recycling what happens to an object when its use is

over: the parts which can be recycled, which ma-

terials are the most suitable for such purpose and

the advantages of recycling are presented.

Figure 3 shows some screenshots of the concern-

ing such topics and of the window which allows the

relative choice.

Figure 3: Some screenshots of the scenes for the knowledge

improvements on materials. In particular the main menu

for wood is presented (top-left) from which it is possible to

reach the subtopics.

In this part there is a high level of interactivity, in

particular during the narration the child will be asked

to answer simple questions or to play little games in

order to keep him interested in the explanation as sug-

gested in (William and Noel, 1998) and to verify if he

is going to understand the treated arguments. These

interactions give also the chance to give additional

information: as an example (see ﬁgure 4) the child

is asked on the material he would use for building a

house through a multiple choice quiz and each time he

gives the wrong answer he obtains the explanation of

why the chosen material is not suitable for that pur-

pose until he answers correctly and gets some addi-

tional information on the goodness of the material for

the particular aim. Another kind of game added to the

software consists on the match of a carpenter tools

with their names by means of drag-and-drop. This

latter game was appreciated by children as it involves

an higher level of interactivity by respect to the simple

question–answer interaction. During the description

of materials features the presence of an extra character

was exploited. In particular since the beginning of the

story a smart beaver is commissioned to give infor-

mation, explanation on the materials and to suggest to

play the games or answer the question. The use of this

kind of characters is popular in living books and edu-

cational cartoons and makes simpler and more natural

the interaction of the software with the user.

Figure 4: The Beaver character during one of its quizzes.

5 GAMES ON MATERIALS

The aim of the story and of the content extensions

is to teach the children the concepts on the basis of

a responsible usage of materials. In order to evalu-

ate their comprehension of such concepts two interac-

tive games were developed and added to the software

suite for entertaining children and evaluating their un-

derstanding of the treated themes. The importance

of games as an instrument for the learning process

is widely acknowledged (Morsi and Jackson, 2007)

(Frazer, Argles, Wills, 2007). The games have been

embedded in the software suite and they share with

the rest of the package the same characters, contents

and philosophy. The games were designed in order to

be stimulating so as to spur the children in the explo-

ration of the package and so as that their entertaining

nature should emerge hiding its didactic aims. Among

the various types of games suitable to be adapted to

these ideas two very common games were selected as

they were considered the most convenient to our aim:

Memory it is a very popular game, known by most

children. A set of pairs of cards representing vari-

ous subjects is placed on the table so that only the

back of the cards is visible, then the player will

try to ﬁnd all the couples by disclosing the cards

two by two. In this work a particular extension to

the game was added: the associative memory in

which a couple of cards corresponds to two cards

brought together by a particular criterion (i.e. a

couple of animals or a couple of objects made in

wood)

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270

Puzzle is the classic puzzle game in which an origi-

nal picture is cut in several pieces and the user has

to recompose it.

These two games were developed in the Java pro-

gramming languagein order to exploitthe well known

portability of this technology, in facts, Java allowed to

create two applications that can be run both as stand

alone software both as part of a web page by means

of an applet.

5.1 Notes on the Memory Game

Two kinds of the Memory game were developed: the

traditional one and its associative version. The user

can choose the type of game through a starting menu

in which it is possible to select the difﬁculty level and

the theme of the employed card deck. There are 3 dif-

ferent difﬁculty levels: easy, normal and hard which

differ for the number of the involved cards (8, 16

and 32 for the three levels, respectively) while for

the traditional memory game two cards themes are

supported: the ﬁrst one representing the characters

utilized in the Three little pigs story and the other

one representing the materials presented in the story

and in the contents extension. It is be possible to

extend the number of card themes in a simple way.

Two different themes were created for the associative

memory game: the ﬁrst one involves the associations

objects-materials in which the user is asked to com-

bine objects made of the same material; the second

one is for the association job-tool in which the task is

to associate a job to its speciﬁc tools. The choice of

card themes has the aim of maintaining a relation be-

tween the strictly educational part of the suite with

this entertaining part preserving the interest of the

child on the material topics. Within this game some

simple tricks have been applied in order to vary the

game each time it is played: the background of the

screen and the back of the cards are changed (with

a color or with a texture) and, within the same cards

theme, different pictures can be selected randomly by

the software. During the game a score measuring the

performance of the user on the game in terms of num-

ber of cards disclosed is calculated. The lower is this

number the better is the performance.

The game ﬁnishes when the user has found all the

card couples. If the obtained score lies within the

10-highest scores the user is asked to write his name

which is added to the game rating. In order to update

the rating it was necessary to use the PHP language to

write on a local ﬁle storing the 10-highest scores be-

cause the Java Applet does not allow to write on local

ﬁles for security reasons. The main aim of the games

is making the children familiar with the themes and

the characters presented in the story and to recall them

the narrated situations together with the treated con-

cepts. The memory game, in addition, in the object–

material associative version, is able to teach the users

on the materials the objects are made of. This aspect

is quite interesting as children get aware of the ma-

terials forming some common object they everyday

use and this new information can be used once they

decide to recycle these objects helping them, for in-

stance, choosing the correct garbage can for disposing

each object.

5.2 Notes on the Puzzle Game

The puzzle game follows the general rules of tradi-

tional puzzle games. In the real version of the game

the pieces have irregular shapes but in this case the

pieces have a square shape and have to be combined

by the user not on the basis of their shapes but of the

images on each piece. The picture used within the

puzzle are taken directly from the represented story in

order to maintain a relation with its themes although

the developed software allows the addition of further

images. As for the memory game, there are different

levels for the puzzle game as well. The levels are de-

termined by the number of pieces the original picture

is cut into: 25, 36 and 64 for the easy, normal and

hard levels respectively which can be selected from

the initial menu. Figure 5 shows the main window of

the game where it is possible to see that, together with

the shufﬂed picture, a scaled version of the original

image is shown to help the user in the reconstruction.

Figure 5: Screenshot of the puzzle game where it is possible

to see the cut image on the left and a miniature of the target

image. On the right a timer and action buttons are shown.

Once the game starts the player will have to re-

compose the original picture as fast as possible, in

facts the elapsed time will be used as performance in-

dicator for the game and, as for the memory, there is a

rating for the ﬁrst 10 highest scores based on the time

criterion. The user is allowed to move one piece per

time from a position to another of the grid which iden-

tiﬁes the shufﬂed image by means of a drag-and-drop

operation.

THREE LITTLE PIGS DISCOVERING MATERIALS - A Software for the Sensitization of Primary School Students to

Environmental Themes

271

6 CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE

WORK

In this paper an interactive software suite for the sen-

sitization of primary school students to the proper

materials use, recycling and energy saving was pre-

sented. The software is formed by three intercon-

nected parts: the ﬁrst one introduces the main themes

by means of the very famous Three little pigs story;

the second part deepens the knowledge of the users on

the materials presented in the story; the third one, by

means of some games and quizzes related to the han-

dled themes, veriﬁes the learning of the children of

the treated topics and entertains them. The main aim

of the software package is to make the children aware

of materials features and recycling. These themes are

presented with a familiar language by the characters

of the story in a children–friendly form which favors

a natural and gradual teaching of the concepts. The

effectiveness of the developed software is supported

by the tests performed on a group of primary school

students who used the package at school for several

days. The tests were very encouraging as the children

interacted with the software in all its aspects and en-

joyed all the parts; moreover in the successive talks

and interviews with the teachers, they proved a good

understanding of the treated themes and a particu-

lar interest on the concepts (i.e. materials features,

the advantage of using certain materials and the im-

portance of recycling). Students particularly appre-

ciated the main story and the extra contents for their

interactive–cartoons behavior while games were use-

ful for revising the concepts with the teachers each

time objects, characters and scenes were presented on

the screen; furthermore games enjoyed the students

and kept alive their interest and curiosity on the soft-

ware and the themes. The test was also used to get

useful information on the software and for planning

its future improvements. This kind of test is recog-

nized as a very useful instrument for the evaluation of

the developed tool and for the identiﬁcation of possi-

ble modiﬁcation on the basis of users reactions which

could improve software’s quality (Jones et al., 1993).

In the future the software suite will be extended by

treating more materials and adding new games. The

quality of graphics and animation will be improved

as well as music and sound effect. At the current

stage the Italian and English languages were used in

the whole suite but the software was developed in or-

der to support further languages. Finally more tests

involving a number of primary school students will

be performed in order to evaluate the efﬁciency of the

software and to exploit users reactions and sugges-

tions for further developments.

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