Persuasive Technologies In Education: Improving Motivation To Read And Write For Children

In this paper we present an example of how principles of motivation can be designed into educational software to support students in achieving their goals. The objective of our software was to develop a reading habit in children between 8 and 11 years of age by motivating them to improve their reading and writing skills. By designing activities that integrate Gardner's Multiple Intelligence theory to our software, we were able to motivate children to read while acknowledging individual differences in their learning process. The results on presenting this software to different groups of children from the city and rural environments show how we were able to motivate students to read through the software itself and the activities it proposes, in a way that was credible and connected to the real-world environment children lived in. Our results show the importance of integrating principles from Persuasion such as similarity, tailoring and credibility, together with theories such as Gardner's in educational software to achieve motivation to read and write in children.