Towards Hyper Activity Books for Children. Connecting Activity Books and Montessori-like Educational Materials

In the first years of school, activity books and Montessori-like educational materials are widespread. They satisfy children’s precise psychological needs and result in funded educational practices based on game activity adopted by teachers. These materials are more effective for promoting learning if used in close interaction with an adult, they cannot be customised and the corrective feedback cannot be provided within the appropriate time frame. In this paper, we aim to overcome these limitations by exploiting a Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) methodology to connect activity books and Montessori-like educational materials. We propose a general architecture for building hyper activity and exercise books called HAB, with three levels: multimedia, multimodality and computing; we describe a first implementation for validating this architecture, Block Magic, and outline development of the architecture under the INF@NZIA DIGI.Tales 3.6 project.