Students develop digital tool to boost reading

abu dhabi — A team of students have developed an innovative tool to inspire a love of storytelling among the youth.

Students of the United Arab Emirates University’s (UAEU) College of Information Technology, Asmaa Rashed Al Awadhi, Hessa Saeed Al Shamsi and Amnah Sulaiman Aldhanhani, have developed a project that they hope will boost reading rates in the Arab world and encourage children to learn to love reading and storytelling. The Emirati students team developed an automated tool that helps recast traditional Arabic stories in interactive gamelike multimedia stories and deploy them on smart devices.

“We feel when a storyteller dies, a library is burnt down. We cannot revive the traditional methods, but we can recapture them with multimedia,“said Al Awadhi.

She added: “We have developed a story translation system that serves as tools for knowledge production, thus contributing to the UAE vision of a knowledge society. The result is a powerful tool, similar to an automated factory, to support story translation.”

To automate the transformation process, the team, supervised by Prof. Boumediene Belkhouche, designed two formal languages: the source language (L1) and the target language (L2).

Al Awadhi said: “L1 is a scripting language that allows the designer to express stories in a formal way (similar to movie scripts). L2 is the game language that is processed by the game-engine to animate the story. Our system transforms automatically scripts in L1 to interactive stories in L2.

“The product is a story similar to those found in the Google Apps store, such as Cinderella and Little Riding Hood.”

She added that the project aims to bring a new dimension to storytelling. “It will provide many engaging opportunities to people, especially children, stimulating their imagination and facilitating their quest to acquire knowledge inside and outside the classroom.

reporters@khaleejtimes.com