Tree Identification Tutor

Software	Language with good GUI tools, or Java and XHTML for a web-based system
Covers	Programming, systems design, web interface development, psychology of learning
Skills Required	Programming, object-oriented design, some interest in how people learn
Challenge	Conceptual ?? Technical ?? Programming ???

Brief Description

Idea borrowed from Sue Jackson, formerly of DMU Milton Keynes.

The aim of the project is to build a computer tutor to teach primary school children to recognise different kinds of trees.

Relatively simple systems can be effective teaching tools. However any interactive system for primary school children needs to be very robust, and the interactions between the system and the children should keep them entertained. Designing an interface to be bright and lively can conflict with making it usable - but creating an interface that's both stimulating and usable shouldn't be an insoluble problem.

An important part of building an effective computer teaching system is having a teaching strategy that fits how people learn. You'll need to think about what activities and ways of providing correction and reinforcement will fit how people learn, and how to put activities into effective sequences.

Variants

There are lots and lots of possible variants on the theme of teaching people to recognise and distinguish between similar-ish things - how about mushrooms, or X-rays showing different kinds of lung diseases? Not all of these will be for primary-age children. How do the different needs and expectations of different target clients influence what the system should do? Older children or adults who need to pass exams or acquire professional skills will be more interested in objective evaluations of their performance, while younger children are very dependent on lots of positive reinforcement as well as enough variety to stop them getting bored quickly.

An applet or website accessible through the web would be an especially valuable resource for learners and teachers.

Extensions

You should consider how you can design your system with a clear separation between the system architecture and the information display mechanisms, and the subject-specific content. Can you design your system as a domain-independent tutoring shell plus a replaceable set of content files that can be used to teach a specific subject, such as how to recognise trees?

The system would be a lot more usable with an easy-to-use editor to create and modify teaching materials, questions and question sequences.

Many computer applications for young children include speech output. Can you find a way to include speech output in your system?

Cross-Reference

For some kinds of computer tutors, having a way of measuring how well the students are doing is important, but building a complex testing tool might be an elaborate task, especially if you want to take the results seriously for evaluating student performance. I've proposed an Internet Quiz Administration System as a separate project.

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