Proposal Title:
Interactive Educational website with quality learning material based on school curriculum and possibly focusing on a specific skill (gardening, computer skills).
It will be appealing to the target audience by featuring an easy to use interface, a friendly color pallet, and appealing characters. The target audience will likely be young folk somewhere between ages 3 to 7 and a broader age range within special education. I would also make it a goal that the website not be overly kiddie as to scare off older students.
Outline reasons for selecting this proposal. What inspires you about this topic? How did you come to decide that this is an area worthy of research and development?
I have a bachelors degree in primary education and worked as a special needs assistant for 3 years. After coming to Ireland I decided to switch to switch to computers. I have always had interest in combining my two skill sets.
I hope to take a look at what is out there and improve upon it, possibly finding gaps such as forgotten age groups or new ways educational websites can be presented. That might mean to add limited (and safe) social functionality or a unique interface such as a navigable world or storybook. I also am interested in something that would give me the opportunity to practice animation (specifically character animation) and making simple games.
From my experience I know that when it comes to websites geared towards the younger crowd, the options tend to be 1. well done interactive websites with no, or shallow educational content, or 2. educational websites based on learning standards and curriculum, but they look and feel cheap and occasionally do not function very well. I found that there is an absence of slick educational websites for the 8 to 15 year old crowd. There might also be room to create a website that focuses on more specific skills/activities such as learning to garden, play an instrument, sports, computer skills, environment, health, cooking, animal care, languages. It might be a good idea to focus on such a topic and it would be easy to incorporate other educational elements.
Briefly describe how you envisage the completed project will operate. A broad conceptual overview is all that is required at this stage.
I need to get more specific in my goal to get very particular at all with this question. But I envision that it would be graphic, full of life, and focused. I have to keep in mind that I cannot create a huge site, like many I have seen, by myself.
I imagine a user would come into the site and easily be brought right into the world where they can go off and watch videos, play games, or adventure around. I would like navigation to be easy but possibly maintain a sense of adventure about getting around the site.
List the textbooks, articles or websites used in preliminary research. Please include Title, Author, Publisher/ISBN.
Sorry no books right now. Mostly I have looked on the web to see what is currently out there.
I did contact 3 teachers I used to work with, 2 of whom are also parents of young children. I asked them what websites the kids are using these days and what content they like to see. As popular websites they mentioned ones that are associated with TV channels, pbskids.org , psbsprout, nickjr, disney. There were also a couple mentions of sites which are more like a resource of educational materials along with games, softschools.com, news-2-you.com.
I also did some googling and looking about to see what is out there. Websites tend to fall into two categories.
websites based on tv shows, books, etc... (typically prettier, higher quality games, videos. educational quality varies widely. From my experience students will just go to the game with the character they like the most and is the most fun, while ignoring other things. Big surprise. These sites often have a similar set of games/activities for each show. Tend to be geared towards younger crowd. Not many educational and fun sites for older kids.)
CBeebies, PBSkids, PBSsprout, NickJr., Busytown, Clubpenguin
Resource websites(these are usually low budget websites with many many links to games, resources, activities. Some are divided into useful categories such as age group and subject. It can be very hard to navigate these sites to find good matereal. Dead links are common. Games are often simple and of lower quality. Some games do not work well. You can often find challenging games for older students.)
bestedsites, kidsknowit, news-2-you, softschools
also US National and, my old friend, Illinois Learning standards
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