The duration of the project is 18 months. The main goal of Qtales is to create a unique platform, through which ebook creators will be able to co-create unique bundled products, expertly curated - having always in mind that they serve the rich and indispensable European heritage in children literature and children education themes.
If we have to distinguish Qtales project is its major parts, these are:
-The Pedagogical and Curation Frameworks
-The Gamification Framework and user interface design
-The Qtales platform comprised of the collaboration platform, the authoring tool and the Qtales store.
-The evaluation of the ecosystem, the exploitation of the results and the establishment of Qtales as a Brand Name.
Central to the Qtales pedagogical framework is a focus on literacy skill development and engagement in reading. Our framework is grounded in developmental considerations derived from an analysis of the broad developmental psychology and education literature. These considerations shape our ultimate activity- and design-focused pedagogical ontology. At a high level, our framework and ontology includes 3 themes: (1) stories, (2) literacy activities, and (3) design considerations, each of which has a number of dimensions. The ‘narrative and stories’ section outlines a codeable category system for Q-tales narratives which include; story plots and types, story characters and archetypes, story forms, story genres and story technology. The ‘developmental considerations’ section of the framework encompasses developmental considerations in relation to the pedagogy of reading literacy from birth to adolescence. It is structured in light of developmental considerations relevant to three broad age categories; children aged 0 – 4, 5 – 8 and 9 – 16, in particular, focusing on three broad stages of literacy development; emergent reading, initial reading and reading to learn. The ‘pedagogical literacy focus’ section concentrates in particular on pedagogical activities organised according to developmental level, each of which is broken down into the following categories; code related skills, comprehension skills, cognitive and metacognitive skills, and social/emotional interaction. Finally, the ‘design considerations’ section focuses on a set of design considerations which we see as complementary to the pedagogical literacy focus; multimedia design, interface design, learning design, disability design and cultural design. On the basis of what was learned from research during the development of the Pedagogical Framework, the Qtales curation strategy was also developed. The objectives of the curation strategy are to: (a) Provide a way of rating the pedagogical quality of a product to ensure that it is appropriate for a given reader and that it helps to improve the literacy of that reader, (b) Develop tools that will not only evaluate a product, but will also provide data metrics that users can access, understand and contribute – creating a virtuous circle, and (c) Evolve a curation network to facilitate the above, to support the launch of Q-Tales and inform its ongoing development. In Qtales, four principal categories of literacy skills are cited as follows: (a) Code-related skills, (b) Comprehension, (c) Cognitive and metacognitive skills, and (d) Social and emotional interactions.
Across the Qtales ecosystem points are awarded to the users in all the components in order to enable tracking of progression (among others). Complementary to the Basis of the Qtales Gamification Framework come the Component Specific Game Elements. These game elements are vertical and cater to the specific needs/goals of the users in different parts of the Qtales ecosystem working in parallel (or extending) to the core game elements. An example of such a game element (Component Specific) is the Mission/Achievement game element that is not – universally applicable. In parallel to the game elements (both core and component specific), come the metainformation for each game element in the Qtales Gamification Framework that illustrates the reasoning for selection and introduction alongside to the target goal for its introduction. The later is used as the evaluation / optimization metric that guides future enhancement on both the framework as well as the unique game elements. As in Games, where "Fun arises out of mastery, it arises out of comprehension and it is the act of solving puzzles that make games fun” (Koster, 2013) in the Qtales Gamification Framework, the same working definition of Game is applied. A game is “a structured set of activities with explicit rules” Roger Caillois, 2001) and the purpose is making that participation in the collaborative authoring of books interesting and enjoyable through the introduction of the game elements. 82 Badges, 62 missions, points, rating and leaderboards are compising the set of game elements designed for the Qtales ecosystem.
One of the major activities of the project was the development of the Qtales platform that is consisting of the following three interrelated subsystems:
-Qtales Collaboration Platform.
The collaboration platform as a part/component of the q-Tales ecosystem has a dual role in the general project architecture. The first one is to provide the end user (both professionals and children/parents) the best experience by being simple while containing a large set of complex functionalities, like any other professional tool would do (i.e. Apple’s iTunes Connect dashboard). The second one is to connect and synchronize in a secure and discrete way all the components of the q-Tales ecosystem. To ensure the users’ sensitive data protection we have established a complex DRM system, introducing the q-Tales master key feature, which gives each user specific access rights on various assets. The q-Tales master key is required in all the requests to the back-end server. The Back-end system is a set of Web Services written in JAVA using the Spring framework to provide an MVC architecture. The front-end is the main user interface which also consists of two parts. The first one is the qTales landing page where the visitor can view all the, relative to the project, information before accessing the second part which is the dashboard. Access to the dashboard is granted only after the user is authenticated via the back-end and obtaining the q-Tales master key. The dashboard is the tool that the user can exploit to create new projects, find collaborators and communicate with other users while creating e-books. It’s the main control panel that contains all the features and tools a professional might need, organized in a non-intrusive and elegant way. Always in tune with the pedagogical and gamification frameworks designed by our partners we provide a more pleasant and playful, design and layout to kids and parents that want to use q-Tales to spend some quality time exploring the authoring tool and creating their own storybooks. The front-end uses a Joomla CMS distribution for the landing page which is easily managed and updated with any type of content we might need to display to the visitor. The dashboard is written in HTML, PHP and JS using jQuery and other frameworks to asynchronously fetch information by calling the various Web Services in the backend and dynamically update the content of the page.
-Qtales Authoring Tool
The Q-Tales Authoring Tool, offers an easy-to-use interface with powerful and sophisticated authoring features which can be used to create e-books that can be, with a single click, published for many different digital screens (iOS, Android, Windows and Mac Os). The Q-Tales authoring tool is based on the Unity3D game engine, but the user it’s not required to have the Unity3D platform to build an e-book. All the required functionality has been exposed to the authoring environment (available for iOS, Android, Windows, Mac Os and WebGL) making the e-book creation free and extremely easy. Q-tales Authoring Tool is not intended only for professionals, but also for parents, teachers and other adults, that want to create e-books for or with their kids/pupils.
-Qtales Store.
The Q-Tales Store is the place where the curated e-books that are developed within the Qtales collaboration platform will be offered worldwide. The Store is based on PrestaShop, which is an open source e-commerce software, free for download and customization. PrestaShop is a simple, efficient, intuitive and user-friendly platform, which is currently used by more than 250,000 online shops. It is a very powerful platform, which is enriched with hundreds of innovative tools to build and manage an online store.
Evaluation, dissemination, communication and Exploitation of project ouputs was the parellel activities during the project that were intensified in the last 6 months. Evaluation took place in two phases. The first took place internally from project partners, while the second with real users. Qtales partners disseminated the project through the participation of international conferences and events. Qtales was present with a stand at Bologna Children's Book Fair – Bologna Italy 4-6 April 2016 and London Book Fair 2016 (London, 12-14 April). Scientific articles were sent for publication in international conferences and academic journals. The social media were largely used for the dissemination of the project results. Q-Tales social media campaigns run on Facebook and 15.568 people reached, 700 of them visited qtales.com. Several other articles were posted in online blogs, news sites and LinkedIn, newsletters were send by partners, press releases published, interviews given, banners placed at relevant sites, links from partners sites’ to the QTales project Website were placed, etc. During the project 4 Collective Intelligence focus groups were organized (Ireland, Italy and Poland) to identify user needs and requirements that align with pedagogical priorities and affordances identified in the mainstream educational,sychology, and learning science literature, and one other in Greece to gather authors opinion on the final platform. The results of the communication and dissemination activities were very positive and the consortium has arrived to the decision of establishing Qtales Ltd in the safe harbor of the Coventry University Technology Park. This move is imperative due to the interest and the strong will that two important organisations expressed: A big publishing house anf a big private school. These will probably be the first clients of the new company, since the project coordinator is already in the process of signing an NDA with the Publishing house and the school has officially expressed its interest in integrating Qtales in the school curriculum.
