A Platform for Generating Educational Activities to Teach English as a Second Language
This addresses the need for automated, customizable teaching tools for ESL educators, though it is incremental as it builds on existing NLP methods.
The researchers developed a platform that uses Natural Language Processing to generate educational activities for teaching English as a second language, offering pre-made games and custom exercises from teacher-input texts with manual review options.
We present a platform for the generation of educational activities oriented to teaching English as a foreign language. The different activities -- games and language practice exercises -- are strongly based on Natural Language Processing techniques. The platform offers the possibility of playing out-of-the-box games, generated from resources created semi-automatically and then manually curated. It can also generate games or exercises of greater complexity from texts entered by teachers, providing a stage of review and edition of the generated content before use. As a way of expanding the variety of activities in the platform, we are currently experimenting with image and text generation. In order to integrate them and improve the performance of other neural tools already integrated, we are working on migrating the platform to a more powerful server. In this paper we describe the development of our platform and its deployment for end users, discussing the challenges faced and how we overcame them, and also detail our future work plans.