Project Ideas
This page contains ideas for enhancing the BuildmLearn Toolkit. We would suggest you to try the toolkit as an end user first before staring to work on any of the ideas.
The 'To Do items' list some tasks that are immediately required to be worked on. If you want to familiarize yourself with the project, it's a good place to start with. Other sections also list the project ideas for which we're looking students to collaborate with.
Documentation:
- Create an end-user document briefing how to use the toolkit. This document should contain screenshots and be very easy to follow for teachers (specially, who are using it for the first time)
- Create a code level document briefing out the architecture of the project and class / function descriptions
Development:
- Increase the font size of labels, lists, buttons, etc in the information and quiz template.
- Make the toolkit window compact or get rid of too much white space on the screen.
- Optimize the toolkit UI for low resolution screens. We should support as low as 800x600 resolution unless there are any other conditions.
- Localization effort for a couple of key languages.
- Support non-Windows environment, enabling the toolkit to run on other operating systems like Linux and Mac. This would require a recompilation of the existing code base with respective environments, and any minor tweaks wherever necessary.
Testing:
- Test the toolkit on different resolutions. The toolkit has few minor bugs, list them and assign them to be fixed in the next version.
The BuildmLearn toolkit provides various application templates for teachers to use. The existing application templates today are information template and quiz template. The first task at hand is to add more such application templates with different user experience and functionality, so that the toolkit can become more useful to teachers and students.
Below are some of the application templates that have been decided to be developed. For each template, development needs to be done on the mobile application side (android) and the toolkit UI side (Qt).
- Application template with a tabbed interface - This interface is useful for teachers to share organized information for students. This template can also be useful to create a conference application - the user can use sections like details of the conference, schedule, etc. as tabs
- Application template to allow adding content in a table form - rows and columns. This kind of template may be very useful for sharing timetables of a class, schedule of an exam or schedule of a one day event, etc.
- Video template - This template would allow teachers to add videos to the application. Ideally generating a collection of videos for the student with some possible custom notes. One of the tasks at hand is to Explore more application templates which can be useful for teachers and students.
The BuildmLearn toolkit is in a usable state, however much needs to be desired for improving the user experience of the toolkit. We want to make the toolkit easy to use - by giving ready to discover and use options for teachers. Thus, this task comprises of adding appropriate menus and shortcuts to the toolkit.
Menus: There are some menu's which are populated, however the functionality needs to be added. Besides, more useful menu items / menus need to be added.
Shortcuts: The shortcuts need to be placed on a shortcut bar, which would be added below the menubar.
The BuildmLearn toolkit currently generates applications for the Android platform i.e. apk files. Research for the feasibility of generating applications for other platforms in order of priority Nokia Asha / Series 40 (J2ME or web), Windows Phone 7/8 and iPhone/iPad platforms.
Working on this research involves reverse engineering a sample mobile application and packaging it again programatically.
The BuildmLearn toolkit is in it's intial phase and has good potential to prove to be very useful tool for teachers / parents who would like to create applications for students / children to induce informal learning.
The BuilmLearn Toolkit helps teachers supplement other technology aids for teaching and reaching out to students in interesting ways. We would like to conduct couple of user research studies for this tool in different parts of the world. The objective of this study would be to observe teachers (or parents) use this tool to create m-learning applications for students and collect useful feedback/suggestions on improvements and new features.
Ideally, we would prefer a student of User research, Human-Computer Interaction, Sociology or Psychology to volunteer for this. Students with engineering background may also help with this task, especially with UI refinements and prototyping, if they are interested.
We would require some UI refinements to the BuildmLearn Toolkit for the future versions. We're happy to work with some design students who may like to propose more usable designs for the toolkit or propose tweaks to the existing design for better usability.
Ideally, we would prefer a student of Design, Human-Computer Interaction or Psychology to volunteer for this. Students with engineering background may also help with this task if they are interested.
Other than this, we intend to create a flash mockups, videos and banners which can demonstrate the utility of the BuildmLearn toolkit. These graphic assets would be really helpful to spread awareness among teachers and adopt our toolkit to create m-Learning applications.