What is it?
T-islessia is a healthcare/social service provided through Interactive TV, developed by a team now with Avalpa Digital Engineering when they worked with CINECA, an interuniversity consortium. It is targeted at 6 year old school children with poor reading and writing performance.
How was it created?
It’s composed of:
- a Java Xlet frontend (written manually)
- an apache/perl/mysql (LAMP) backend for daily exercise generation and data collection (from the STB return channel) and statistics.
Screenshot from T-islessia
How does it work?
Selected children play the games on a TV at school daily for 40 sessions, each morning during April and May. The test results are sent through the return channel to the service centre. At the service centre, (or preferably through a web site), a team of psychologists evaluates the results and changes level of difficulty of the exercises relative to the skill level of the child in question.
Does it generate revenue?
It is paid for by the Public Administration Healthcare service.
Where has the application been deployed and with which MHP/GEM version?
T-islessia has been deployed in the Emilia Romagna region of Italy on two local DVB-T broadcasters (Sestarete and Tele Radio Citta’ Modena) and runs on MHP 1.0.2 cheap standard commercial STBs.
Screenshot from T-islessia
When was it first made available?
This service was funded in 2004 by the Italian Ministry of Communication through their arm Fondazione Bordoni. It ran on air for three years in a row: 2005/06, 2006/07, and 2007/08. In later runs, the service has been funded by “Provincia di Modena, Assessorato politiche sociali”.
Further information
The core engine of the T-islessia xlet has been made available by CINECA as open source software together with the MHP carousel server. This potentially allows other MHP content creators focus on the content more than on the basic bricks that remain the same. The source code is available from CINECA here: http://www.cineca.tv/labs/mhplab/index-en.html
Further information about the project can be found here: http://convegni.cineca.it/T-islessia/
Most of this information is in Italian, but this presentation is in English.
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