A Framework to Author Educational Interactions for Geographical Web Applications

This paper focuses on the production of authoring tools that teachers may use to prototype interactive geographical web applications. We present some computational models and a toolset that we designed to address some needs of teachers trying to make use of particular localized documents called “travel stories”. Our research challenge is to enable teachers to design interaction scenarios for such a domain, avoiding any programmer intervention. In the design process, the teacher typically faces three activities: (a) Identification of candidate documents, (b) Evaluation of the adequacy of the document and (c) Production of the learning application making use of the selected document. In this paper, we mainly focus on the (c) Production activity. We highlight the necessary use of an “agile” approach to shorten as much as possible the delay between the design and the evaluation step of a prototype. To address the technological challenges raised by such an aim, we present WIND framework and we discuss its capabilities while considering some examples of interactive scenarios generated with WIND framework.