How is Educational Software Created?
Heloisa Martins Costa
Hello to all
My name is Heloisa Martins Costa, I'm brazilian teacher. I'm happy
because I'm included in this list. I would like to know if educational
software is programed by teachers or by other professional included in
this process. What do you think about this ?
Thanks
Heloisa Martins Costa
pr2...@PRO.VIA-RS.COM.BR
Tim Armstrong
Heloisa,
I'm with an educational software development company, and I can tell you
from experience that educational software is created by a variety of
different groups of people.
These are my generalizations based on what I have seen. When teachers
write programs their work is narrow in scope, so the programs have very
limited use. Also, the programs lack the spit and polish to make the user
interface work well and the program to look "professional." Also the
programs seem to have more noticeable bugs.
When programmers create programs without teacher (and student!) input,
the educational side (content, presentation, relevance, etc.) suffers.
The biggest problem though is often ease of use. Teachers don't have time
to spend a couple of hours learning how to use a program because that
means they'll have to spend hours of class time teaching students how to
use the program.
I think the best programs are created when teachers and programmers work
together and when the work is tested by students. This past spring my
company finished two programs that were developed working with local high
school teachers. The programs were tested by students in their classes
and in a summer school program. One program was in development for about
18 months. The teachers provided invaluable insight and ideas which made
the programs EXTREMELY better than we could have done ourselves. The
students also provided a number of wonderful suggestions in addition to
helping us see how students would use the programs (regardless of what we
intended). I've seen programs developed by other companies that involved
teachers on the project teams, and these programs are almost always well
received by teachers who see them.
Hope this helps answer your question.
Tim Armstrong
Password, Inc.
arms...@umbc7.umbc.edu
Martin Benson
Another approach that people may be interested in.
I read somewhere about the concept of instructional "nicheware"...
software that is written to fill a very specific instructional need.
These needs tend to universal at this level... In other words, if you
got a group of teachers together that are teaching 3 grade math, for
example, and led a focus group on instructional needs, you would get
a pretty focused list. Nicheware would consist of a set activities, a
virtual machine, a simulator, web bookmarks with print activities,
etc... that would hit the instructional need in a very focused way.
The teacher would access this activity and have the students do it in
short block of time, 30 minutes, one period, whatever.
For you the question would be, how does this stuff get distributed?
What you would end up having for product is a library of these
focused activities. How would you make money?
Have you seen WWW.BIOLOGY.COM? This is a subscription sevice run by a
web publisher called Peregrine Publishing. They offer links to
special webs sites, and could, if they had it, offer descriptions,
preview, and downloads of "nicheware". The nicheware use could be
restricted by licenses, passwords, or timebombs, or could have a
functionality in which it needs to link to the web to run. (Download
data or a daily code via automatic FTP) In addition, ROM's containing
the library could also be sold.
Development-wise, with good ideas, these things could be turned out
relatively quickly using ToolBook or some other authoring utility
that has a free runtime.
As consumers of educational software, we would much prefer this type
of approach to the textbook on a ROM or great big instructional
system approach, and in fact we write out own nicheware.
Martin Benson
Director of Multimedia Services
Springfield Technical Community College
1 Armory Sq.
Springfield, MA 01101
mbe...@mail.stcc.mass.edu