Castor: Designing and experimenting a context-aware architecture for creating stories outdoors

This work describes the design and the experimentation of Castor, a novel architecture for creating, editing and delivering engaging geolocalized context-aware stories outdoors. Castor is one of the first architectures that enable the direct creation of structured stories in-situ, rather than the simple gathering of material, and that use an extended set of context dimensions (i.e., environmental and social context) for augmenting the emotional engagement of the story listeners. The architecture was experimented in an educational project of two semesters, performed integrating the traditional educational path of a class of children aged 7, with the full collaboration of their teachers. Our architecture demonstrated to have an important role for bridging the gap between the structured classroom learning and the outdoor experience, engaging the children for obtaining interesting results in terms of acquisition of new skills, collaboration and social inclusion.