A semantics-based exploratory game to enrich school classes with relevant historical facts

The teaching of History in primary and secondary education often attains low levels of learning and understanding. Building on the success of previous experiences in the area of serious games, we are investigating the potential of situational curiosity and serendipity to increase the retention of historical facts. We present a game designed to explore networks of relationships among the topics of upcoming classes (not necessarily History ones) and topics that may be of interest to their students in a given place and/or on a given date. The design of the game's concept is supported by an intelligent system that uses DBpedia and YAGO as the main sources of knowledge in the search for semantic links among concepts. The teachers are given tools to revise the meshes of concepts and relationships, to modify things and to introduce new relationships.