A system for creating and listening to context-aware stories outdoors

CASTOR is a novel software infrastructure and set of interfaces that has been designed for supporting all the cycle of creation, management and delivery of context- aware stories outdoors. The software infrastructure and the user interfaces were tailored to the skills of children of the Primary School, for being used in the context of educational curricula targeted at teaching the structures of narration. In [8, 9] we gave a description of the experimentation of CASTOR with a class of children, focusing on the effects on engagement and learning. This paper is focused on the technical features of the software infrastructure and the set of user interfaces. Using these interfaces, stories can be created on the locations where they are supposed to happen, can be refined in the classroom or at home for improving the quality and can be delivered to listeners, respecting all the context conditions specified by the story creators. The extended abstract is an excerpt from the paper 'A software infrastructure for managing the lifecycle of context-aware stories' published in the proceedings of the ACM IDC 2013 Conference.