CULTURE SENSITIVE EDUCATIONAL GAMES CONSIDERING

COMMON SENSE KNOWLEDGE

Junia Anacleto, Eliane Pereira, Alexandre Ferreira, Ap. Fabiano P. de Carvalho

LIA - Advanced Interaction Laboratory, Department of Computer Science, Federal University of São Carlos, Brazil

João Fabro

Department of Computing, State University of West Parana, Brazil

Keywords: Common sense, culture sensitive learning, contextualized learning, educational game, sexual education,

pedagogical issues.

Abstract: When an 8th grade science teacher discusses the subject “contraceptive methods”, s/he has to consider

situations and facts that are known by teenagers to better understand their behavior and define his/her

approach. Suppose that the teacher says “the rhythm method is not one of the most efficient contraceptive

methods”. But does the teacher really know which contraceptive methods are considered by that group of

students? It is proposed here a framework to instance web game supported by common sense knowledge to

approach the called “transversal themes” of the school curriculum in our country, like sexual education,

ethic and healthcare. The quiz game framework called “What is it?” is presented as a support for teachers in

contextualizing the content to the students’ local culture, promoting a more effective and significant

learning.

1 INTRODUCTION

To prepare citizens who are cultural and social

committed is one of the goals to be reached during

the children’s school life. In developing countries

like Brazil, many of the social and economical issues

would be better faced if the education system were

improved and more effective. In such situation, it is

being considered that the information technologies

(IT) adoption by schools is necessary. However,

adopting IT to support formal education is still a

challenge in the new era of knowledge for Brazil and

for other developing countries.

The developing countries’ effort for digital

including their citizens has to start in classroom.

Adopting IT solutions, it can be possible for teachers

to promote new ways of building students’

knowledge, and provide them pleasant tasks during

their learning process, what can facilitate digital

inclusion.

So, it is urgent to distribute computers for

teachers and students, but it is more than urgent to

prepare teachers and provide them with software

tools to support the IT technology adoption inside

classroom. Furthermore such software tools have to

be a solution developed considering the reality, the

context and the culture of that country.

To promote the use of educational games,

considering the children’s excitement about

computer games, it is presented here an educational

computer game framework to support teachers in

teaching the transversal themes defined on the

Brazilian curriculum. 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 there are pedagogical issues that

should be considered for stimulating the learning

process, even and especially when IT is adopted.

Culture sensitive and contextualized learning

considering the student’s reality is the pedagogical

issue focused in this paper. It is proposed to consider

the apprentices’ common sense knowledge to

promote the learning aiming at: adopting a

vocabulary that is familiar to the students;

instantiating content and clarifying myths, beliefs

and taboos that are cultural heritage. Some examples

of this kind of knowledge related to sexual

education, one of the transversal themes, are:

teenagers believe that girls do not get pregnant

during their first sexual relation, that pill has to be

taken on the day she is going to have sexual relation,

and that AIDS is a homosexual disease. This kind of

knowledge can be mapped from the commonsense

136

Anacleto J., Pereira E., Ferreira A., Fabiano P. de Carvalho A. and Fabro J. (2008).

CULTURE SENSITIVE EDUCATIONAL GAMES CONSIDERING COMMON SENSE KNOWLEDGE.

In Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - HCI, pages 136-141

DOI: 10.5220/0001675501360141

 SciTePress

knowledge and can be clarified by teachers during

classes.

The game framework called “What is it?” (“O

que é, O que é?” in Portuguese) aims to produce

instances of a certain type of game that help players

to infer a certain secret word related to a certain

transversal theme (explained on the next section)

considering a set of clues presented one at a time.

There is a commonsense knowledge base used by

the game framework to help on reaching such goal.

This paper is structured as follow: section 2

explains the relation between commonsense

knowledge and education; section 3 presents some

games which collecting commonsense knowledge is

the main goal; the “What is it?” game framework

prototype is presented on section 4 and some

conclusions are presented on section 5 as well as

some future works.

2 USING COMMON SENSE TO

SUPPORT EDUCATION

Common sense is defined here as the knowledge that

most people agree with in 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 and

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

2006a; Anacleto et al., 2006b) have shown that

automatically collected common sense knowledge

can be used to 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 researchers from pedagogy.

For instance, 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

acquired by the social relations. Such knowledge can

help in contextualizing the learning process to the

student’s reality. Papert (1985) says that the

education system should consider what students

learned with their family or community, the

knowledge acquired before they start at school, and

understand how it can influence their learning

process, i.e. he is referring to the common sense

knowledge.

In a convergent view, these educators highlight

the relevance of the knowledge on culture and

common sense as a factor that interferes in student’s

learning process. Teachers should consider and use

the common sense knowledge in their pedagogical

activities aiming to help learners to associate the

content being taught to their personal experiences

and knowledge. Such approach allows to bring into

the classroom the discussions about what was

previously described, like myths, believes,

misunderstandings, so they wouldn’t take as correct

facts. Besides that, the use of common sense

knowledge provides to 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 Ministry. These themes

are defined 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). Transversal themes are not new disciplines,

but subjects that have to be taught inside the other

disciplines in the curriculum. Six themes are

defined: sexual education, ethics, healthcare,

environment, cultural plurality, market and

consumers (SEF, 1998).

Sexual education, for example, intends to discuss

with children and teenagers what the messages from

media are, what they learn from family and society,

intending to complete and clarify the information

that they already have and, mainly, creating the

possibility for students to form an opinion about the

topics that were presented to them. Considering the

definition presented here, it can be understood that

the topics are related to the students’ knowledge

acquired from their group and social experiences,

corresponding to the common sense knowledge. In

this research, it is discussed the transversal themes

through a common sense based game approach.

3 COMMON SENSE AND WEB

GAMES

In an effort to facilitate the process of collecting

common sense knowledge some online computer

games have been developed. One of these games is

Verbosity (von Ahn, Kedia and Blum, 2006), which

is designed for two players, one of them plays the

role of “Narrator”, who gets a secret word and gives

clues to the other player, the “Guesser”, who tries to

guess the word. The common sense fact collection is

done when the guesser suggests an answer based on

the clues already presented to her/him.

CULTURE SENSITIVE EDUCATIONAL GAMES CONSIDERING COMMON SENSE KNOWLEDGE

137

The game LEARNER 2 (Chklovski, 2005)

consists of a web system with what they called

proactive knowledge acquisition, which collects

information about the everyday life, focusing on the

parts that compose the things and the use of those

things. The system asks the users about specific

topics and compares the answers with the common

sense statements stored in its knowledge base. The

bigger is the number of similarities found, the more

is the number of points granted to the user

FACTory (Cycorp, 2007) game presents a

statement to the player who might say whether it

makes sense or not. When a number of users agree

with one of the two possible classifications, the

statement is validated as true or false and it is not

presented to the users anymore.

Common Consensus is an online game that asks

some questions to the player, who is encouraged to

supply as many answers as possible in a certain

period of time. When time is finished a score is

shown to the player (the number of times that the

same answer was given previously for different

users) (Lieberman, Smith and Teeters, 2007).

In the next section it is presented “What is it?”

(http://lia.dc.ufscar.br/game), an online common

sense-based game framework developed in the

context of the Brazilian Open Mind Common Sense

(OMCS-Br) Project (www.sensocomum.ufscar.br).

Although “What is it?” also collects common sense

knowledge, it has some issues that are being

considered, as it is explained the following.

4 THE “WHAT IS IT?” GAME

FRAMEWORK

This research aims to make possible the use of

common sense knowledge in web-based educational

games, aiming at stimulating the learning

contextualization and the knowledge construction in

the learning process. Furthermore, it intends to

collect common sense knowledge from teachers and

learners who use the generated games. It is being

developed a common sense-based quiz game

framework called “What is it?” which brings

common sense clues up the players’ mind, aiming at

working on a specific subject. The main purpose is

that the game is to be used by teachers to work on

subjects which have been approached in classroom.

The game framework is part of the OMCS-Br

project that uses a collaborative approach in order to

construct a common sense knowledgebase to be used

by computer applications supporting human-human

interaction and human-computer interaction. It

provides a web site where volunteers can contribute

with common sense statements in natural language,

according to the approach presented in (Liu and

Singh, 2004). In Brazil, the project is developed at

LIA - Advanced Interaction Laboratory, from the

Federal University of São Carlos - and focuses on

supporting teachers to contextualize their learning

activities, aiming at promoting meaningful learning,

in a culture sensitive process (Anacleto et al.,

2006a).

It is worth pointing out that “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 and school degree.

To take into account the players’ profile during

the collection is especially important because of the

culture sensitive approach, which makes necessary

to develop applications for specific groups of people

in a certain region and age, considering their

context. In this case, the common sense knowledge

can be filtered and the designer of the application

can consider only the knowledge collected from the

desired profile in order to contextualize the design to

the target group. This is what happens in “What is

it?”. It allows their users to configure instances of

the game, as it is explained in the next sub-sections.

Table 1 compares the common sense-based

games previously mentioned, concerning the

collection and the use of common sense knowledge,

as well as the consideration of the player’s profile.

Table 1: Common sense-based games comparison.

GAME ACSK CCSK TPP

Verbosity - X -

LEARNER 2 - X -

FACTory X X -

Comon Consensus X X -

What is it? X X X

As it can be noticed, Verbosity and LEARNER 2

work only on collecting new common sense

statements’, not making use of the statements

already gathered and stored in their knowledge base.

Factory, “Common Consensus” and “What is it?” go

beyond, also making use in some way of the

statement previously obtained – FACTory and

Legend:

ACSK: Apply Common Sense Knowledge

CCSK: Collect Common Sense Knowledge

TPP: Take into account Players’ Profile

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“Common consensus” use the knowledge stored

with the purpose of validating it by the users and

“What is it?” uses the knowledge to generate the

clues which are presented in the game. Those clues

are related to the players’ answers and stored in the

OMCS-Br knowledgebase. Finally, “What is it?”

takes into account the players’ profile.

Besides the fact of considering the players’

profile, the game “What is it?” was designed

considering pedagogical issues with the purpose of

using it as a tool to the learning process.

As it was presented before, the use of common

sense in the learning process is suggested by several

educators who defend that by contextualizing the

learning it is possible to promote meaningful

learning in those ones involved with it (Freire, 1996;

Vygotsky, 1987; Papert, 1985).

In addition to that, the use of games in education

has been defended by several researchers. According

to Jacquin (1963) the game is one of the most

important things to children. In this way, it is an

excellent tool for educators to reach their duty.

Jacquin defends that the relation between children

and games has the same level and intensity that the

relation between adults and jobs. Huizinga (1980)

and Chateu (1987) are other researchers who agree

with Jacquin proposal.

Therefore, it is possible to note the importance of

games in the human being’s development and in the

support of the educational process. Considering that

games are more and more common in the

information society in which people live nowadays,

to design games focused on the educational process

is very relevant.

The game framework is divided in two modules:

(1) the player’s module, a quiz game in which the

players must guess a secret word, considering a set

of common sense-based clues and (2) the game’s

editor a seven-step wizard which guides teachers to

create game contextualized instances. Details of

each module are presented in the following.

4.1 The Player’s Module

Figure 1 presents the “What is it?” player’s module

main interface. To illustrate the game use, it was

developed a game instance considering the theme

“Sexual Education”. To start the game the player

should, first of all, click on the dice, represented in

Figure 1 by the yellow letter “S”, whose faces

represent topics related to the transversal theme on

which the teacher intents to work. In Figure 1, the

letter “S” corresponds to the topic “Sexually

transmitted diseases”. Other topics which can

potentially compose the “Sexual Education” theme

Figure 1: Player’s Module Main Interface.

dice, according to the teachers’ necessities, are

“anatomy and physiology”, “behaviour” and

“contraceptives methods”. The letters, which

represent the topics, are presented to the player fast

and randomly. When the player clicks on the dice it

stops and say about which topic the secret word,

which should be guessed, is.

The use of a dice to organize the game according

to topics complies with Conati and Zhao (1987)

proposal, who say that it should be clear to learners

which knowledge area is approached in the game,

avoiding that they get lost with the presented

concepts. Each topic has a set of cards associated,

which are related to different secret words. These

cards are defined by teachers in the game’s editor

module, using the support of a common sense

knowledge base. In addition to that, it is possible to

relate a list of synonyms to each secret word. These

synonyms are also accepted as expected answers.

The clues play the role of supporting the player

to guess which the secret word is. Each card can

have a maximum of ten clues which can be selected

by the learners by clicking on a number into the “Set

of clues” area, which can be seen in Figure 1. After

having the topic defined by the dice, a card with

clues is presented to the player and, as s/he selects a

clue, it is displayed on the blue balloon. The players

can select as many clues as they consider necessary

before trying to guess the word.

As the players try to find out the secret word, the

system collects common sense knowledge, storing

the relation between the word they suggested and

clues that were already displayed. This collecting

process is interesting (1) for teachers, who can

identify possible misunderstanding by analyzing the

answers that learners with the profile of their target

group give to a specific set of clues, and, therefore,

approach those misunderstandings in classroom to

clarify them; and (2) for the OMCS-Br

knowledgebase, which will increase the number of

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stored common sense statements. It is important to

point out that the answers provided by the learners,

which do not correspond either to the secret word or

to a synonym defined by the teacher, are not

considered incorrect by the system. Those answers

just tell to the system that the answer provided make

sense to the player considering the set of clues

already displayed.

The strategy used in the game to promote the

reinforcement and meaningful learning are based on

the Minsky’s Theory (Minsky, 1986) about the way

which the mind works. In this theory Minsky

proposes that the mind has several agents who are in

charge of the many processes which can happen in

it. Some of those agents are responsible for the

learning process and, according to Minsky, each

knowledge fragment learned is kept near to the agent

which made possible that learning. These agents are

called knowledge lines (k-lines) and are activated

every time someone tries to solve a task. In this way,

when someone tries to solve a task, the mind

reactivates the agents which were activated when a

similar task was solved, linking the knowledge

fragments which are near to those agents. At the end

of the task, the new and old knowledge are linked by

a k-line. Each time a k-line is activated the

knowledge which it uses to solve a task becomes

more and more connected to it, what configures the

learning reinforcement.

In the game, the clues represent the knowledge

fragments which are supposed to be in the learner’s

mind, since it is part of the common sense

knowledge gotten from people which share the same

profile. Through these fragments the learners’ mind

will try recovery what was presented by the

professor in classroom and to perform the learning

reinforcement. If new knowledge is presented in a

clue, the student will associate that knowledge with

the knowledge they have already learned,

performing a meaningful learning, according to the

Learning Theory proposed by Ausubel (1963).

4.2 The Game’s Editor Module

The game editor is a seven-step wizard which guides

the teacher to create game instances, which fit to

their pedagogical goals.

During the card definition, teachers receive the

support of common sense knowledge. For that

purpose, in the framework editor Step 1 teachers

have to define the population profile which should

be considered in the search for common sense

statements in the knowledgebase. In this way, the

system guarantee that the statements which are

going to be presented to the teacher were gathered

from people who have the desired profile to the

game instance, i.e. the statements are contextualized

to the target group. This process is called common

sense filter definition. Once the filter is set up, the

teacher can choose the secret words for each card. In

the following, the teacher can define a list of

synonyms for each one of the secret words.

In the two next steps the teacher must define

three items: (1) the game main theme, which should

be chosen from the six transversal themes available

and (2) the topics, which are specifics subjects

related to the transversal theme chosen, compose the

game dice faces.

The next steps consist of defining the secret

words, their synonyms and the set of clues for each

secret word. For each secret word defined, it is

performed a search on the OMCS-Br semantic

network, called ConceptNet-Br, that increasing the

number of words associated with the secret work.

The concepts associated with the secret word and

their synonyms are presented to teachers as natural

language statements and, based on these statements,

teachers can compose the card clues. For example,

the relation (IsA “aids”, “sexually transmitted

disease”), found in the ConceptNet-Br, is presented

to teachers as “Aids is a(n) sexually transmitted

disease”.

Then the teacher can (a) select a common sense

statements as clues, adding them to the card set of

clue; (b) edit a statement to make it suitable to the

game purpose; or (c) just ignore the suggestions and

compose others clues. It is worth pointing out that

the sentences edited or composed by the teachers are

also stored in the OMCS-Br knowledge base as new

common sense statement collected from that teacher.

Figure 2 presents in the box “List of clues suggested

from common sense knowledge base” some

statements retrieved from the OMCS-Br knowledge

base which can be used as clues, as it was explained

Figure 2: Game’s Editor Module.

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before. Those statements are related to the secret

word “aids”. The box “List of clues already chosen”

shows the clues which were already chosen to

compose the card.

It is also important to point out the fail-soft

approach adopted in the framework. This means that

the statements suggested to teachers can be valid or

not and the teachers will decide for accepting or not

the suggestion. However, the suggestion does not

bring any problem to the teachers’ task performance.

On the contrary, it helps the teachers to finish their

task faster and more efficiently (Lieberman et al.,

2007).

5 CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE

WORK

This paper shows “What is it?”, an educational game

framework whose purpose is to help teachers to

work on the transversal themes proposed by the

Brazilian Secretary/Minister of Education: sexual

education, ethics, healthcare, environment, cultural

plurality, market and consumers. The intention is to

give teachers some support for teaching these

themes concerning their students’ context and

culture through common sense knowledge usage,

and at the same time 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 respected educators like

Papert (1985), Freire (1996) e Freinet (1993).

Preliminary results of using the game point out that

this approach is useful from both points of view –

teacher’s and students’ once it is considered helpful

for teachers to have a previous knowledge of their

students’ habits, believes, myths, and as their

common sense knowledge is represented in that

specific game instance, they feel like that game is

specially developed for them, for their reality.

As future works it is intended to improve

interfaces, after that, it is being planned to perform a

case study with teachers and students from the

Brazilian public education system, in different cities,

in order to assess the game usefulness and to gather

new requirement to fit it to the teachers and learners

necessities.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We thank FAPESP, CAPES and PDTA/FPTI-BR for

partially supporting this research.

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