IMPLEMENTATION OF DIGITAL DICE AND ITS APPLICATION ON OPEN DIGITAL ENGLISH INSTRUCTION-ASSISTED SYSTEM Rong-Yuh Hwang Department of Electronic Engineering, National Taipei University of Technology, email: ryh@en.ntut.edu.tw Abstract Elementary school students in Taiwan started to learn English as a required course at Grade 5 in 2001. And in no later than 2005, elementary school students will start their English course at Grade 3 as the latest policy of Ministry of Education. To achieve the ultimate goals identified in the Nine Year Integrated Curriculum, this proposed Principal Project aims to collaborate with the other four Sub-Projects to develop and implement an interactive Elementary English e-material and e-assessment system. In this paper, we develop a digital dice and applied it to the digital English instruction and assessment. Key Words e-learning, m-learning, e-assessment system, wireless communication network, English knowledge database, digital learning 1. Introduction English is the most popular worldwide language. In our country, several policies have been carried out to match the international trend. One of the major policies is to fulfill the English teaching from the elementary school. The government has a big ambition to teach English to every child from elementary school level. This is a good and maybe necessary idea; however, several factors affect the function of English policy. English teaching and learning resources are very different in urban and rural areas in Taiwan. In general, citizens in urban areas such as capital Taipei have more channels to have their children learn English, and often are willing to support the budget of English learning after school. On the other hand, citizens in rural areas do not have many alternatives for extra English learning after school. As a result, the average English proficiency level between urban and rural areas has become greater over the years. And this problem will become more serious because of the following reasons. 1) Urban areas usually enjoy more education budgets to buy teaching devices and provide more reward to their teachers. 2) Most qualified English teachers hope to teach in urban areas. These reasons will enlarge the difference between urban and rural areas as well as affect the teaching and learning results. According to the statistics of some literature in Taiwan, there is almost five sixth of the students who cannot catch up with the current curriculum. This is really an intractable problem for the basic English education in Taiwan. According to current elementary school English teachers, the teaching load is heavy for them. Before teaching, they need to prepare teaching materials, which include teaching activity design and teaching content design. After teaching, teachers must evaluate students learning effects, which include school assignment correction and teaching material and teaching activity self-criticism. On the other hand, the teaching of children English needs more auxiliary teaching materials such as voices, pictures, videos, and so on. The multimedia teaching material is benefit for the English teaching but most English teachers do not have the ability to make these teaching materials, because it is beyond the ability of an English teacher. In this paper, we introduce a digital dice and its application on English instruction and assessment 2. Purpose of System The major goals of this project will come true with several things. 1) Designing and implementing a digital instruction-assisted system. In this system, we will implement the English teaching material, planed by the sub-projects I and II, into the digital instruction-assisted system which includes teaching materials and assessments. In fact, almost the editor of current English teaching material has only one or two teachers to save editing budget. The editor, teacher, has not the idea of computer related technology. Therefore, the editing of teaching material can easily be felled into a trap. On the contrary, the English experts in our project have the good understanding in English teaching. Several sub-projects leaders are the instructor 416-213 182
of elementary school. They know what the teachers need in the elementary school is. Therefore, the digital instruction-assisted system to be planed and implemented can match the requirement of English teachers in the elementary school. 2) Let teacher become the real master in the classroom. The instruction-assisted system is designed as open system. The open concept make English teacher easily inserting additional teaching materials into the original teaching unit. Certainly, teacher can also create a new teaching unit by using the existed teaching material in the English knowledge base. The English knowledge base developed in the principal project stores all kinds of source teaching material. And the finished teaching material can also be stored back to the English knowledge base to be shared with all teachers. This action will promote the resource integration. 3) Reducing the teaching load of English teacher. For a smart English teacher, they hope to design several interesting and smart teaching activities; however, the amount of homework after teaching activity is enormous. The extra teaching load makes almost teachers stop the smart but significant teaching activity. By means of the construction of our instruction-assisted system, the teaching load from teaching activity and homework will be reduced significantly. 4) Combining the e-learning and m-learning concept into the system to create happy learning environment. In the digital instruction-assisted system, teacher can easily reveal the teaching material to all students and can make a real time assessment to revise teachers teaching. This action helps teacher understanding the learning condition of students at the first time to reduce the requirement of the remedial teaching. 5) To fostering the person of talent of application domain in 2C. The related person of talent of this project includes computer network, database, Microsoft visual software, SQL, wireless communication, and computer system. In this project, we will apply the above knowledge into the English instruction-assisted system. Internet English Knowledge Base (Server) Digital Instruction-assisted System (Host PC in the classroom) (Teachers) LCD Projector (Students) (Householder) Mobile Devices Mobile Devices Office PCs Wireless LAN/Bluetooth Classroom Fig. 1 The Overall Architecture of Digital Teachi ng Assistant System 183
3. Overall Architecture The overall architecture of the digital instruction-assisted system is shown in Fig. 1. In this figure, the hardware teaching devices of classroom include Host PC, LCD projector, and mobile devices. The digital teaching material and teaching assessment are installed in the host PC. Host PC and LCD projector are used for the English teacher and the students hold Mobile devices. Teachers can play the instruction-assisted system via LCD projector, and students receive the message from the screen of LCD projector and/or from their mobile devices. During the teaching proceeding, several activities can be executed. The teaching assessment can be executed during the proceeding of teaching program; it means that the instruction-assisted system can support real time assessment. The host PC can be a desktop PC, tablet PC, Notebook PC, or PDA. When teaching activity is carried out, the related data will be downloaded to the mobile device. And then the activity can be started. During the proceeding of teaching activity, all students data will be transmitted to the host PC to save into the corresponding learning record; the instruction-assisted system will calculate the test result and quickly respond to the teacher. After school, the teaching activity can be continued via the Internet. The members of Internet include teachers, householders, and students. The teaching activity can also be executed outdoor. For such a case, the wireless environment will be constructed such as Ad hoc. The details of the outdoor activities will be discussed at the execution of the project. Finally, the instruction-assisted system will be designed as an open system. The meaning of open system is that user can modify the original teaching materials and assessments to generate new teaching materials and assessments, describe the input parameters to generate different activities, or redesign a new teaching and assessment by means of the help of instruction-assisted system and English knowledge base. It is impossible to apply one teaching material to the whole students; therefore, open system concept is very important in the digital teaching material and assessment. The open concept is the main feature of our projects and this feature is not yet found in the current E-learning teaching material or E-learning Web server. ÂY»ë l (a) Initial sate of digital dice (b) Rolling dic (c) Final state of digital dice Fig. 2 Pictures of digital dice 4. Implementation of Digital Dice Dice is a popular auxiliary teaching tool in English instruction and assessment. In this paper, we implement a digital dice to replace the traditional dice. The implementation steps are as follows. Step 1: Construct dice pictures Illustrator is professional drawing software. All pictures of dice system are finished in the illustrator. Figures 2 184
and 3 display all picture of dice. In general, there are three kinds of dice pictures: 1) Initial dice pictures is shown in Fig. 2 (a). In this figure, three dices and one start button is constructed. Rolling dices are displayed in Fig. 2 (b). These pictures are used to increase the reality of dice rolling. Finally, result dice pictures are showed in Fig. 2 (c). A result dice is selected after rolling to display the number of dice. All dice pictures will be imported into the Flashed MX. Step 2: Edit and program pictures on the scene of Flash MX Now, each picture is placed on the different layer. The final result is named as initial state of digital dice. Rolling dices as shown in Fig. 2 (b) is formed as a movie clip and stored in the library. Similarly, final state of digital dice is also store in the library. Then, sever action scripts are appended into the corresponding pictures. Random number is employed to create the asynchronous rolling time of dice and generate the final dice number randomly. Now, several rolling dices have finished. The rolling action is very well. Then, several applications of English teaching will be developed. There are many English instruction and assessment activities can be played via the digital dice. Here, we illustrate two typical applications of digital dice. First, Vocabulary and letter instruction and assessment can be preceded via digital dice. The scenario of application is described as follows: teacher is teaching color/pronunciation in the classroom and wants to know the learning effects. The teaching material is stored in the English knowledge base. Therefore, teacher presses start button to select a group or a student for answering the question. Then, teacher can press another question button to select a question. The implementation of the question button is similar to the start button. When question button is pressed, system will extract a random word/letter from the Vocabulary/ letter data base in the English knowledge base, and display the word/letter on the dice. An example is shown in Fig. 3 (a). The test result can also be recorded in the English knowledge base. Similarly, digital dice can also be used to the sentence practice as shown in Fig. 3 (b). RED (a) Vocabulary/Letter practice accessed from English knowledge data base A English Knowledge Data Base I like pink (b) Sentence practice accessed from English knowledge data base Fig. 3 Application of English teaching for the digital dice 5. Conclusion The major achievements of this integrated project are: 1). To establish a series of digital teaching and learning materials and multi-assessment system to serve as the base for promoting digitalized elementary school English education; 2). To integrate related resources, and to develop expandable and accessible supporting teaching materials in order to enable teachers to meet various students needs, hence to shorten the discrepancy between urban and rural areas; 3). To use wireless mobile learning devices in order to promote peer learning, and to create virtual learning settings anytime, anywhere; 4). To elevate students learning through the integration of teachers, students, and parents feedback with the help of digitalized multi-assessment system; 5). To analyze and evaluate digital learning for future reference; 6). To reduce the waste of paper through the use of wireless mobile learning devices, e-learning materials, and on-line multi-assessment. We are developing an open digital English instruction-assisted system. This work is integrated project for three year. Now, this project is implementing several instruction and assessment activities. In this 185
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