If you are interested in how it
all works, read on ...
The CD-ROM version of wordPROF® is written in Visual Basic and uses
Access databases
to organise the course materials and to manage the student records. Every
word the student has studied is tracked in a personal database.
This approach allows wordPROF® to offer some powerful and
distinctive features.
- Each word can be included in multiple courses so wordPROF® is able to provide courses which teach the full word lists for four GCSE boards.
- Many words appear in more than one lesson but once the word has been learnt,
it is
removed from subsequent lessons automatically. This means that each individual
lesson can
offer a comprehensive word list for its particular subject but the student can take
lessons in any order without being taught the same word twice.
- If a student switches between courses (e.g. from Edexcel GCSE to NEAB GCSE), any words already learned are removed from
the new course automatically.
- The student can look up a word in either language, find the subjects it occurs in and
then list all the related vocabulary.
- Scene interaction uses many-to-many mappings between words and their hotspots.
For example, the "party" scene shows glasses of beer and wine. All are recognised
as glasses but only the appropriate ones are valid for the specific drink.
- New languages can be supported very easily because once the words have been translated, all the
courses, lesson structures and artwork from previous languages can be re-used.
Work is already in progress on an extended database to offer improved support
for synonyms, language variants such as US and British English and
generalised cross-language teaching.
The online content you see here is presented using Active
Server Pages (a subset of Visual Basic) on the web server and a mix of VBScript
and JavaScript on the client side. Because interactive scenes
use Dynamic HTML, they do not work under Netscape.
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