Abstract
Smile and Learn is an EdTech digital publisher that offers a smart library of close to 100 educational stories and gaming apps for mobile devices aimed at children aged 2 to 10 and their families. Given the complexity of navigating the content, a recommender system was developed. The system consists of two major components: one that generates content recommendations and another that provides explanations and recommendations relevant to parents and educators. The former was implemented as a hybrid recommender system that combines three kinds of recommendations. Among these, we introduce a collaborative filtering adapted to overcome specific limitations associated with younger users. The approach described in this work was tested on real users of the platform. The experimental results suggest that this recommendation model is suitable to suggest apps to children and increase their engagement in terms of usage time and number of games played.
Highlights
Smile and Learn is an EdTech digital publisher that creates and distributes educational mobile apps for children aged 2 to 10 and their families. e company offers a smart library of around 100 stories and gaming apps to provide a complete educational experience.In addition to the content offering, the library has a smart component that gathers user information and analyses the performance across applications to obtain a detailed snapshot
We only considered the applications available in the Smart Digital Library (SDL) that can be suitably described as interactive apps; this distinction is pertinent because the applications that were left out of the study have very different interaction dynamics
Recommender systems are often based on explicit user feedback. is, is a factor, as the approach requires users who are sophisticated enough to provide it. is imposes a major limitation in the children’s educational technology space, for the patterns of attention and interaction with the apps are quite different from those of adults
Summary
Smile and Learn is an EdTech digital publisher that creates and distributes educational mobile apps for children aged 2 to 10 and their families. e company offers a smart library of around 100 stories and gaming apps to provide a complete educational experience. Is has allowed the development of a wide range of applications that perform tasks like monitoring progress [1] and student fatigue [2], scaffolding learners [3], recommending open educational resources [4], modeling learners [5], or predicting future performance [6, 7], among many others. While some of these systems work in ways that are nonintrusive and transparent to the user, others provide direct feedback to the user or the educator [8].
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