The aim of this project is to build a system that will facilitate children with special learning disorders in literacy. We are developing a system that enables children to practice the necessary literacy skills and to facilitate over-learning and repetition of these skills.

Before developing the system, we researched a wide range of pedagogies specifically designed for teaching children to read and write. In our project we will try to facilitate the teacher in combining phonic methods, whole word methods and whole language methods. Considering the amount of time and attention, work and consistency involved with aiding special needs children we realise that a computer cannot come close to replacing the teacher. Keeping this in mind, we are creating a system that will help the teacher create a learning environment. Much thought and research has been put in to creating an easy interface for the teacher to capture the environments and to develop various literacy games within these different environments. From the literature, it is obvious that computers have the following advantages; increased motivation, individualised instruction, informative feedback, active learning and precise monitoring. There are a wide range of companies developing software in this area and exploiting highly complex multimedia to aid children with special needs. This is beyond the scope of this particular project.

Specification of the system

Firstly we did extensive reading in this area of specific learning difficulties in order to get to grips with the current research in the field. Our co-ordinator Margaret Farren, Lecturer in the School of Computer Applications, DCU and Bernadette Dwyer, a primary school teacher with expertise and experience of teaching children with specific learning difficulties held regular team meetings to discuss the project. With their experience and expertise we tried to get an idea of what would actually be useful based on current software and practices. A plan of action, timetable, records, deadlines and precise areas of responsibility had to be agreed on in order for the project to work efficiently. This is a great opportunity for us to develop technical skills and to work with real users to complete the project for B.Sc. in Computer Applications.

In the context of this project, a learning environment is defined as a computer representation through multimedia of a real world entity. The idea is that an environment would give a context to learn within. Capturing an environment would mean that certain operations would be able to be performed on it such as re-sequencing and re-representation. The closer an environment is to a child's real life experience, the more appropriate it is. In our case study, sight and sound will be the only two senses catered for.

Our environment will make use of video (audio-visual) such as videos downloaded from the Internet or videos recorded on digital camera. An environment is considered captured once it is on the system. This environment will be re-represented by taking out key frames. The video itself is used as the context in which a child can learn new words, sounds, and phonics through pedagogical literacy games.

Literacy Games

The games are the learning exercises. There are different ways of designing game using graphics to make the game more stimulating and fun. Our focus however will be based on established pedagogical card games. We hope to provide a system for creating these exercises based on any existing environment.

The idea is to provide the teacher with templates that would aid him/her to make game configurations. Then by filling in the game configurations with images, sounds and words from different environments creating specific game depending on the requirements of each child. We will define a common protocol between templates in order to give a wide range of configurations. Configuration can be saved and reused for different environments. For example,

1.. A template would be a deck of blank cards.
2.. The configuration would be two sets of blank cards being used in a game(Say snap)
3.. We could play a game of snap using the set of animals. The set of animal images and
sounds would be the environment.

Note,

a.. The configuration for the game of snap will always be the same, but the environment values may change, we could take the set of cars for example, and still play snap.
b.. The environment essentially fills in the values of the configuration.
c.. The configuration is constructed with templates.

Feedback to the teacher is through the game. This is a complex issue computationally. We have to establish the information relevant to teachers. We can implement programs to track recurring mistakes, keep a record of time spent on topics and of statistical data on mistakes. There is a wide range of possibilities as to how much data can be stored on each child. Within the scope of this project, we're providing a basic feedback system.

Rewards are another issue that are very important. They are vital in keeping a child motivated throughout a lesson. Also rewards should be instant, in order to encourage the child. A graphical stimulating reward is all that we would be capable of at the moment, however there is much room for improvement in this area and we have many ideas regarding it.

The system is a three tier client server, database, middle, and client tier. There area many child clients and one teacher client. The middle is the interface between the clients and database. The database will hold all the data collected on children/statistics as well as words, sounds and images captured from different videotaped environments. The environment will be the key to accessing all images, words and sounds related to it.

Suggestions for Improvements of System

This project has given us many ideas for its possible improvements in the future. For example, the client server model could be developed through the internet where by there would be a global server shared among many schools, reusing existing environments (and all the data associated with them), updating them and giving feedback. Plus any feedback from a child monitoring system could also be sent to this server to give important feedback and different literacy issues on a national level. The Project shows how the technical expertise in Third level institutes can support certain curriculum needs at primary level schools in order to make effective use of ICT in order to improve student learning.