MATCh project

: MULTIMEDIA AUTHORING ENVIRONMENT FOR ChILDREN A two-year (1996 -1998) EC INCO-Copernicus research and development project

Project overview

MATCh authoring environment

MATCh applications

WWW pages

Project overview

Partners

The consortium consists of three business and four academic partners:

Pliroforiki Technognosia, Athens, Greece (project coordinator)
Addison Wesley Longman Logotron, United Kingdom
A. W. Bruna Uitgevers B.V., The Netherlands

Comenuis University, Bratislava, Slovak Republic
University of Patras, Greece
Eotvos Lorand University, Budapest, Hungary
D epartment of Information Technologies, University of Sofia, Bulgaria

Scope

The integration of information and communication technologies in schools happens throughout whole Europe. These technologies offer adequate support for a paradigm shift from Instructionism to Constructionism. School environments urge for stimulating educational software, that meets the adventurous expectations and the cognitive demands of the young students. Teachers, on the other hand, require that computer technology equips them with simple and functional learning tools in order to organize suitable learning environments. Developers have to create computer environments which are efficient and easily manipulated by students and teachers.

Aim

The aim of the MATCh project is to design, develop and test a multimedia authoring environment for children: a powerful, user-friendly, transparent and open-ended environment capable of providing authoring, multimedia, networking and collaboration facility to the student, the teacher and the developer.

Target group

The age of the target users of the MATCh authoring environment is 8 to 14 years.

Layers

There are two major layers in the output of the MATCh project: the Authoring environment and three MATCh applications.

MATCh authoring environment consists of the following tools:

Frame Editor - a tool which allows the user to create, modify and use graphics and images in MATCh applications.
Sound Editor - a tool which allows the user to import, record, modify and play speech, sounds and music.
Story Editor - the major component of the MATCH authoring engine: a tool which allows the user to combine the results produced by the other editors (i.e., graphics, animation, sound, music, etc.) in order to produce multimedia stories. A model for the story is designed, easy enough to be understood by children. In general, a story is a set of inter-linked multimedia pages. It can be used in two modes: Run and Edit. Each page can have static elements (background, images, buttons, texts) and dynamic elements (animated actors). Each element can have its own agenda: list of actions to be carried out when the user clicks with the mouse on this element in Run mode. There is a graphic scripting language to specify the agendas in Edit mode. The Animation Editor is a separate tool called by the Story editor to make animations. Each animation is a set of states, associated with different angle dimensions. For each angle dimension there is a set frames with corresponding delays.
Web editor -a tool which enables the user to create WWW pages from the static part of a MATCh story.

Three multimedia applications

They will demonstrate the functionality of the multimedia authoring system. The child can play and learn in an application by doing, by acting on them instead of just observing phenomenon. The applications will be highly interactive and will have an intuitive interface. They will be open - the user will be enabled, encourages and assisted to expand and further develop the applications by building his own scenarios with them, by adding new objects and functions as his expertise grows.

Other MATCh WWW pages

MATCh WWW workspace of the Bulgarian team
Resource Bank for applications being developed in Bulgaria

This page has been developed by the Bulgarian MATCh team

. Last updated by Iliana Nikolova on 18 April, 1998.