Hyeong Kyeong Hwang is a PhD student at the Department of Information engineering and science of the University of Trento and developed the Q-book: a system which allows exploiting the potentials of the e-book for learning.
Thanks to this invention she won the international contest “Future”, for the section Entertainment, media and gaming. The contest attracted over 400 projects, submitted by candidates of all European countries. They were evaluated by professors, entrepreneurs and start-uppers looking for innovative ideas, to improve the world of future.
E-books are increasingly widespread: over 5 million readers in the world declared they read at least one in 2013 and over half of the didactics books published in 2013 were in electronic book format.
These figures prove how the future of reading and education will depend on these tools. However, lot still remains to be done to make them more pleasant, engaging and useful.
Hyeon Kyeong Hwang comes from South Korea, she studied Computer Information Systems and then accesses a Master of Science at the University of Trento and combined her study with a field practice, 6-year long experience, working for Microsoft, thus in the field of Information Technology. She is currently studying technologies aimed at improving and supporting education, to find innovative ways to
help people reach new objectives, using information technologies.
Q-book is based on the cognitive theory which assumes that our brain represents information by combining words and images: when we learn something new, combining what we read with images and videos, we will remember it more easily.
Further, we learn better when we are able to combine new information with something we already know. Q-book does not only show multimedia contents. It encourages readers to choose personally the videos and images they consider most useful, interesting and suitable for them, among those available.
The application allows asking questions to users. It automatically detects the keywords of the text, suggesting links and relevant contents, yet users are free to choose the most useful information and submit their strategies. The result is a network of text and image contents, remarks, questions and answers, which all users may create and choose, according to their needs. Q-book is able to automatically sum up chapters, detect the most important concepts and make the memorization of information easier. A prototype of this application was integrated in the e-Schooling platform, with the cooperation of the Autonomous Province of Trento, Telecom Italia, Edizioni Centro Studi Erickson, Forteam Studio and Memetic. The platform aims at creating advanced models for digital didactics.
More information is available in the attached Press release.