Back in spring, we were trying out the Cognitive Tutor Authoring Tools (CTAT) with teachers from the Rocca al Mare school and our good colleagues, Emanuele and Aet. With CTAT, teachers can design and implement computer-supported learning activities that can help students practice the necessary skills for various topics, either in the classroom or as homework.
The use of CTAT for STEM-related subjects is quite broad and there are tons of online resources for Math, Physics, Chemistry, etc. So our little exercise was to brainstorm how we could develop a CTAT-tutor for other topics such as history, literature, or geography. To do so, we followed the example of a particular mother who used to “elicit” geography-related knowledge by playing with her child (no names given) the “match the country with the capital” game. For example, the mother would “Germany” and the child should spell the name of the capital of Germany. If the child didn’t know the capital, they could ask for “tips”. After a number of tries, the mother would just reveal the correct answer.
Our example GeoTutor does exactly that: it provides names of countries and asks the student to fill in the names of the capitals.
The process of creating the GeoTutor with CTAT can be followed here: https://youtu.be/rFW9j7RJEk0