A software infrastructure for managing the lifecycle of context-aware stories

This paper describes the features of CASTOR, 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. CASTOR has been designed for managing an extended set of context dimensions, including the location, the weather, the season, the time of the day and the social context, that are used for creating and delivering engaging listening experiences. 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. In this work we'll focus instead on the technical features of the whole infrastructure and the set of user interfaces supporting all the story lifecycle. In particular the paper will show how, using these interfaces, stories can be created on the locations where they are supposed to happen, how they can be refined in the classroom for improving the quality and how they can be delivered to listeners, respecting all the context conditions specified by the story creators. At the end we'll give some details about the future development of the platform.