A multimedia-driven ambient edutainment system for the young children

ABSTRACT

Recently, there has been a tremendous demand for developing tools to support education and entertainment in a seamless manner. Many existing works in this domain have focused on developing systems that either require too much interaction or are not suitable for young children who are at their very early stage of learning. It is also very challenging to develop an edutainment environment that does not require special technical skills, yet provides useful functionalities. In this paper, we address this issue and present the design and development of an ambient edutainment system for the very young children. Based on communication and multimedia technologies, "it" provides educative and entertaining capabilities for children between the age of 1 and 4. One of the important features it presents is the transformation of narrative activities into visual representations. Children, supervised or unsupervised, can have both the capability of improving their cognitive skills and learning about new objects and entities through the use of visual presentations provided by the proposed system.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.1 Multimedia Information Systems
          Subjects: Audio input/output

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.2 User Interfaces (D.2.2, H.1.2, I.3.6)

General Terms:
Design, Human Factors

Keywords:
ambient, edutainment, multimedia, young children