COMMON SENSE KNOWLEDGE BASE EXPANDED BY AN

ONLINE EDUCATIONAL ENVIRONMENT

Junia Coutinho Anacleto

, Alexandre Mello Ferreira

, Eliane Nascimento Pereira

Izaura Maria Carelli

Marcos Alexandre Rose Silva

and Ana Luiza Dias

Computer Department, Federal University of São 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 computers games use on educational field have been growing as a potential tool to facilitate the

teaching-learning process. In the “What is it?” environment, presented in this article, the teacher can be co-

author of a guess game based on cards, in which, the common sense knowledge support the teacher to be

aware of students’ culture and necessities. The environment also proposes a way to collect common sense

statements, where engines on editor’s module and player’s module store all user interaction and combine

this information to make new relations into Brazilian Open Mind Common Sense project (OMCS-Br)

knowledge base. A study case was done by teachers and students from two different public schools, whose

result point out the potential of this new way 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 computation class or they

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

the computers’ capabilities for educational purpose,

what could allow teachers to enrich 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

182

Coutinho Anacleto J., Mello Ferreira A., Nascimento Pereira E., Maria Carelli I., Alexandre Rose Silva M. and Luiza Dias A. (2009).

COMMON SENSE KNOWLEDGE BASE EXPANDED BY AN ONLINE EDUCATIONAL ENVIRONMENT.

In Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - Human-Computer Interaction, pages 182-185

DOI: 10.5220/0002000701820185

 SciTePress

teachers during classes. The game called “What is

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

help 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 gives an

introduction about a study case; section 5 presents

some conclusions as well as some future works.

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 fulfil a small cadastre with

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

others.

In order to collect common sense knowledge, the

volunteers have to complete some semi-structured

statements in natural language, called 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 put 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).

The whole 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 the 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 the knowledge

that students already reached when they start at

school. This knowledge is acquired by the social

relations they are participating in their community.

According to Freire, the teacher should “discuss with

students the origin of some of this knowledge

considering the content is being presented”. Such

knowledge can help in contextualizing the learning

process to the student’s reality, what is extremely

important for Freire. 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

found when it is intended to teach the called

transversal themes from the official school

curriculum, defined by the Brazilian Education

Secretary, considering that “the commitment on

constructing the feeling of citizenship demands a

pedagogical approach to reach the comprehension

on the social reality and the rights and

responsibilities related to the personal and

collective life, what 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 the knowledge’s construction in the learning

process. It also intends to collect common sense

knowledge from who use the game. The

environment is divided in two main modules. The

player’s module is a quiz game where users should

COMMON SENSE KNOWLEDGE BASE EXPANDED BY AN ONLINE EDUCATIONAL ENVIRONMENT

183

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 during the

interaction can be related to their profile. In the

registration the users provide information such as

their age, gender, geographical location, interests

and school degree. Taking into account the players’

profile during the collection is especially important

because of the culture sensitive approach, what

makes necessary to develop 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 the knowledge collected from the

desired profile in order to contextualize the design 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”. In order 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 (on figure 1, “C” is

associated with the topic “Contraceptive Methods”)

and they are randomly presented, so the player can

be in touch with the different topic 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 players need 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 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 three items: (1) the game’s main

theme, which should be chosen from the six

transversal themes available; (2) the topics, which

are specifics subjects related to the transversal theme

chosen in order to compose the game’s dice faces;

(3) the cards, which have a secret word related to

one of topics defined, an optional secret word’s

synonym list, and a group of clues.

In order to receive the adequate support of the

common sense knowledge, the teacher must define

the profile which should be considered in the search

for related statements in the knowledge base in order

to guarantee that statements were gathered from

people who share the desired profile, fitting the

game’s instance to his/her pedagogical goals, i.e.,

the statements are contextualized to the target group.

After the teacher has defined the secret word and

the synonyms, he/she must define some clues – at

least one clue for each card. A list of suggested clues

is shown came from the common sense knowledge

base. To create these clues the game editor uses

some API functions, available to communicate with

the ConceptNet.

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

ICEIS 2009 - International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems

184

into new statements, and then, new relations in the

ConceptNet. For instance, when a teacher include

the word “Johnny” as a synonym for “condom” one

new statement will be created “An other way to say

condom is Johnny”, which will be at ConceptNet,

the relation (DefinedAs, “Johnny”, “condom”). It is

still important to points to the fail-soft approach

adopted in the game, which means that the

statements suggested to teachers can be valid or not

(Lieberman et al., 2007).

4 STUDY CASE

In order to validate the “What is it?” environment

with real students and real teachers, a study case was

done within 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. Both

schools provided computer laboratories, but the São

Carlos’ lab was under reform, then laptops from our

lab were taken to there. The teachers’ rule was to

configure a new game instance and the students

played it. In Foz do Iguaçu the study case was

performed at the school’s lab, but with internet

access restrictions regarding to the word “sex”.

Teachers couldn’t configure a game about sexual

education and they even couldn’t register themselves

because of the gender/sex field (male/female). To

solve the login problem, a generic login and

password were given to them.

Table 1: Study case participants.

ÃO CARLOS FOZ DO IGUAÇU

TEACHERS

2 4

STUDENTS

4 5

AGE

UNTIL 11 BETWEEN 12 TO 15

GRADE

IFTH SEVENTH

Detailed information about how the study case in

both schools was conducted, the results obtained, as

well as a discussion about them will be presented in

further articles.

5 CONCLUSIONS\FUTURE

WORK

The “What is it?” educational game environment

aims to allow 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 Secretary of

Education, concerning 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 like Freire (1996) and Freinet (1993). As

the design of the interaction considers their culture,

it can motivate learners to play since the information

present has a meaning to their context, becoming

them more interested and engaged to play. This

research also explores a new way to collect common

sense statements to enrich the OMCS-Br knowledge

base. Exploring the web feature, 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.

REFERENCES

Anacleto, J.C., Carvalho, A.F.P. de, Neris, V.P.A., Godoi,

M.S., Zem-Mascarenhas, S., Talarico Neto, A., 2006.

How Can Common Sense Support Instructors with

Distance Education? In: SBIE 2006, Brasília.

Anacleto, J.C., Carlos, A.J. F., Dias, A. L., 2008. Bridging

the gap among cultures: the challenge faced by

teachers on producing content for computer-aided

education. In Proc. SIGDOC 2008, Lisbon.

Carvalho, A.F.P. de, Anacleto, J.C., Lieberman, H.,

Godoi, M.S., Zem-Mascarenhas, S., 2007. Using

Common Sense for Planning Learning Activities. In

Proc. CSIUI 2007, Honolulu.

Freinet, C., 1993. Education through work: A model for

child centered learning. Edwin Mellen Press, NY.

Freire, P., 1996. Pedagogia da autonomia: saberes

necessários à prática educativa. 31ed. RJ: Paz e Terra.

Lieberman, H., Smith, D., Teeters, A., 2007. Common

Consensus: a web-based game for collecting

commonsense goals. In Proc. IUI´07, Hawaii, USA.

Liu, H., Singh P., 2004. ConceptNet: A Pratical

Commonsense Reasoning Toolkit. BT T J, v.22, n.4.

Secretaria de Educação Fundamental, 1998. Parâmetros

curriculares nacionais: terceiro e quarto ciclos: temas

transversais. Brasília: SEF/MEC.

Vygotsky, L., 1987. A formação social da mente. São

Paulo: Martins Fontes.

COMMON SENSE KNOWLEDGE BASE EXPANDED BY AN ONLINE EDUCATIONAL ENVIRONMENT

185