Involving Learners and Domain Experts in the Analysis of the Context of Use for the TERENCE Games

TERENCE is an adaptive learning system for poor comprehenders, that is, children that demonstrate text comprehension difficulties, related to inference-making, despite proficiency in low-level cognitive skills like word reading. Its learning material will be stories and games for its stories. There are several pencil-and-paper interventions by psychologists for improving inference-making skills, and educators have their own in their daily interaction with poor comprehenders. In order to analyse such interventions and transform them into the smart games of TERENCE, we adopt the user-centred design methodology. This means, first of all, analysing and specifying the context of use of the system via an ad-hoc approach, consisting of a preparatory preliminary study, followed by field studies. The paper describes this approach and hence the main results relevant for the design of the TERENCE games.