C/C/33. Master's Dissertation. Developing a Computer Aided Learning (CAL) application for teaching Calculus to the 16-18 year olds

Computer Aided Learning (CAL) has recently gained importance in the study of subject areas ranging from mathematics to music and for the students of all ages, all over the world and has been successful in educing various basic as well as advanced concepts through this new way of learning. This project investigates various issues related to CAL through a comprehensive literature review and attempts to develop a deep understanding of Software Engineering theories and concepts while developing a CAL application for teaching Calculus to the 16-18 year olds. Developing a CAL application is an interdisciplinary field and requires the knowledge of educational issues, the subject area i.e. Calculus in this study and the command over Software Engineering. The review of the literature found that the user interface is the key for the success of interactive learning software package. User Centred approach was therefore employed to design the system with the idea of 'building the right system first, before building it right'. Various techniques such as 'storyboarding' and flow charts were used in the design phase. The implementation was influenced by the Rapid Application Development (RAD) that is an iterative approach and attempts to build the 80% functionality of the system in 20% time. Continuous user testing was done at each iteration, and later evaluated by the real users through a questionnaire. The results show high satisfaction levels as the package was considered very useful by the majority of users. The deliverables include the working system built using HTML (Hyper text mark-up Language), Flash and Java Scripting.