MiRacconto App: Narrating the Self to Design the Future. A UDL-Based Approach to Early Orientation in Primary Education

This paper presents MiRacconto, an educational application designed for primary school with the aim of fostering early guidance through digital autobiographical narration. The app is grounded in the paradigm of Life Designing (Savickas, 2014) and in the principles of Universal Design for Learning (CAST, 2024), adopting narration as a formative and inclusive device (Bruner, 1990; Gaspari, 2024). Its structure is inspired by the metaphor of the “tree of competences”, which guides children through a reflective pathway articulated in four stages: roots (experiences and connections), trunk (values and personal traits), branches (skills and interests), and leaves (dreams and aspirations). The process does not require autonomous writing, but instead proposes guided choices supported by pictograms, speech synthesis and dyslexia-friendly fonts, thus ensuring accessibility also for pupils with linguistic or cognitive difficulties. Developed with MIT App Inventor 2, the app collects the selections made by pupils and generates a personalised final product: a PDF file visually representing the tree and documenting the autobiographical profile constructed. This artefact becomes both a tool for identity recognition and a support for self-designing. In this way, MiRacconto takes shape as an inclusive narrative environment, fostering agency, self-awareness, and projectual competence from the very beginning of primary education, while contributing to the reduction of marginalisation and the promotion of educational equity.