Virtual Study Partner: A Cognitive Training Tool in Education

Abstract

The ways of giving, receiving, processing and storing knowledge are changing rapidly. In a few years, in fact, the Web has radically changed our daily lives, making it indispensable for the most disparate reasons, from work to communication and learning. The availability of unlimited knowledge more and more often doesn't correspond to an improvement in school productivity of the new generations. All the problems stem from the fact that the social and educational systems have not evolved with the same speed as the technology. Moreover, the economic crisis has negatively affected this problem. Today it is increasingly difficult for adults to be present at home and help their children do their homework activities in the early school years. In this paper, we present and discuss our Android mobile application we called "Virtual Study Partner". This mobile application has to be considered as the first output of a wider research activity that aims to provide study support to young people in school-age by integrating both machine learning concepts and Cloud technologies. Virtual Study Partner consists of a cognitive training tool which enables and integrates the experimental Learning Framework that we are developing at the University of Messina.