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Wordinary: A Software Tool for Teaching Greek Word Families to Elementary School Students

Published: 29 March 2023 Publication History

Abstract

Learning word families, that is sets of words with the same root, is important for children of very young ages as it helps them to grow their reading and writing skills in Greek. This is why teaching such word families is one of the main topics of the Modern Greek courses in primary and secondary education of Greece. This paper presents Wordinary, an interactive desktop application that supports teachers in their efforts of teaching Greek word families to elementary school students. The application presented in this paper is the first of its kind that supports the Greek language. Wordinary is meant to be used by teachers to support the design of learning activities related to teaching Greek word families for any word found in the official schoolbooks of the six elementary school grades in Greece. The application was developed following a user-centered design approach and the Python programming language. Two usability evaluation studies were conducted, one user testing study involving end users, and one heuristic evaluation involving HCI experts. The studies found that Wordinary is a usable and useful application. Evaluation results also identified issues for improvement, which led to a redesigned version of Wordinary.

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      cover image ACM Other conferences
      PCI '22: Proceedings of the 26th Pan-Hellenic Conference on Informatics
      November 2022
      414 pages
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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      Published: 29 March 2023

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      Author Tags

      1. Children's spelling ability
      2. Educational software
      3. Elementary school teaching
      4. Human-computer interaction
      5. User-centered software design
      6. Word family teaching

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      PCI 2022
      PCI 2022: 26th Pan-Hellenic Conference on Informatics
      November 25 - 27, 2022
      Athens, Greece

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