Title: Match application "Save the Animals": a multimedia game (BG)
Author: Iliana
Company: FMI

Match application (BG)

Holiday Land (Holiday Wonderland)

           (referred to as “Calendar” in previous MATCh discussions) 

1. 	Overview

This application has a cultural emphasis and has both national and international flavor. It also has a global and personal perspectives. 

The application is centered around the following question: 

What, when, where and how do children celebrate?

The child is taken to a “Holiday Land” - a projection of our world, where every day is a holiday and the child can visit/join celebrations on different occasions at different places and times. 

There is a main character - a guide (clown/jester?) who accompanies the child in the journey. He is funny, friendly and changes his clothes and behavior in tune with the holiday currently explored. 

To select a holiday the child can search by:
•	subject (what?)
•	date (when?)
•	place (where?)

When entering a holiday s/he can play with an interactive multimedia presentation about that occasion. The presentation of a holiday includes information about the essence, meaning, traditions related to the holiday (with text and audio) as well as pictures, video, animation. 

There will be small games and activities for the child to do interactively when exploring a particular holiday. While in a holiday the child can play/create/send a related postcard. 

From each holiday s/he can pick up a typical object (symbol) for that holiday - as a souvenir - to add to a special personal album. At the end of the journey the album can be viewed and each item can take the child back to the holiday it is associated with. The Album can be continuously upgraded and shared with other children. 

We are not sure yet if it will be possible to implement this feature

The application can be extended by creating presentations for other national/international/personal occasions. The long term perspective for this application could be to cover a whole range of traditional holidays from many countries and end up with an interactive multimedia inter-cultural encyclopedia. Our team can not develop the application to this large extend. This can be a follow-up of the MATCh project with the contribution of all the partners. 

Currently we have selected the following Bulgarian and international holidays to represent:

Bulgarian traditional holidays:

1. 	Holy Night and Christmas - 24 and 25 December
2. 	New Year - 31 December
3. 	“Kukeri” (February:7 weeks before Easter)
4. 	“Baba Marta” (1 March)
5. 	The Day of the Flowers (1 week before Easter)
6. 	Easter 
7. 	The day of the Bulgarian literacy and culture (24 May)
8. 	St. Constantine and Elena (“Nestinari”)

International holidays

1. 	Christmas
2. 	New Year
3. 	St. Valentine
4. 	Easter
5. 	1 April (the day of humor)
6. 	1 June (the Children’s day)

Learning aspects of the “Holiday Land” application

•	learn new facts about the represented holidays 
•	deeper grasp the essence and origin of national traditions, customs, symbols
•	enrich culturally with knowledge about life and traditions of children from other countries
•	create a feeling of being part of a multifaceted world
•	develop stimuli for inter-cultural exchange
•	develop creativity and analytical skills when representing a holiday - select the most important information and structure appropriately 
•	develop skills for selection, presentation, communication and sharing of information
•	develop technological skills for processing multimedia information

Problematic issues for which we need the assistance of other partners
•	English language (especially for recorded speech)
•	source information for international holidays  - text, pictures, music, video
•	implementability of the Album concept - collection of symbols of holidays or other elements from the holidays’ pages and adding them to the Album page while being in a holiday page (indirectly changing a page from within another page).