Eliza Pitri

This paper presents the design and pedagogical rationale of an AI-powered avatar developed to mediate Cypriot woven heritage for preschool education. The study is conceptual and design-oriented, focusing on how visual motifs from Cypriot traditional weaving can be reinterpreted through an LLM-based conversational system grounded in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). The system, named Sophia, transforms textile patterns from the fythiotiko tradition into dialogic narrative prompts that support storytelling, visual exploration, and creative expression in early childhood contexts. The proposed framework is intended to illustrate how artificial intelligence can support the reinterpretation of cultural artifacts as pedagogical resources when embedded within guided-play and museum-based learning approaches. It integrates visual analysis, dialogic storytelling, and artmaking into a structured learning sequence that moves from observation to interpretation and creative transformation. Rather than claiming empirical outcomes, the study positions AI-supported storytelling as a design hypothesis for culturally responsive early childhood education. It argues that AI systems can function as mediational tools between material heritage and children’s imaginative engagement, provided they are developed with pedagogical intentionality, cultural sensitivity, and ethical oversight. The paper concludes by outlining design principles for implementing AI-driven storytelling systems in museums and classroom contexts and identifies the need for future empirical validation in real educational settings.

The need to move away from traditional assessments, as well as the need to contextualize assessment with interesting, real-life, and authentic tasks, should be considered as a crucial element in 21st-century education. This need has become more evident during the COVID-19 pandemic, and even more so with the emergence of generative AI models such as ChatGPT. Authentic assessment holds the potential to do so, even though not a lot of emphasis has been placed on it during the last two decades. This study therefore examined (a) teachers’ beliefs about authentic assessment, (b) their self-efficacy in designing authentic tasks, and (c) their intention to adopt these practices after completing a graduate-level classroom-assessment course through a mixed-methods design.

This paper explores the intersection of folk art, museums, and education in the 20th century, with a focus on the concept of art as experience, emphasizing the role of museums as active, inclusive learning spaces. A collaboration between the University of Salerno and the University of Nicosia has developed virtual museum environments using virtual reality (VR) to enhance engagement with cultural heritage. These projects aim to make museums more accessible and interactive, with future potential in integrating artificial intelligence NPC and VR strategies for personalized visitor experiences of the Nicosia Folk Art Museum.

The changes taking place during the pandemic regarding the interchange between online and face-to-face teaching in the Department of Education of an Eastern Mediterranean private university, led to the need of instructors not only to revisit knowledge on creativity but to examine the views and perceptions of early childhood student-teachers about creativity. More specifically, through informal interviews, we examined 15 junior early childhood student-teachers’ beliefs concerning creativity in general and the traits of a creative individual, whether creativity can be developed in education, and how it could contribute to early childhood teachers’ professional development. In this article, we summarize a qualitative descriptive study that took place in the context of the course Designing Activities in Kindergarten and describe the results from the semi-structured interviews that aimed to find out early childhood student-teachers’ views on creativity providing evidence for the participants’ need for a framework and strategy to guide their creative instructional design and teaching.

Information about the paper titled "THE ROLE OF BOUNDARIES IN THE CREATIVE PROCESS" at IATED Digital Library

Information about the paper titled "TRANSFORMING SCHOOL PAVEMENT INTO A NARRATIVE IMAGE FOR MULTIMODAL PLAY" at IATED Digital Library