The motivation of this software is to develop an interactive GIS application which should enhance student activity and interest in learning world history. Computer aided teaching enables teachers to engage the students better by increasing desire and motivation to learn. This thesis focuses on creating a GIS multimedia teaching tool about the Africa continent. The tool provides interactive graphical information of colonial history, independence history, points of interests, demographics and physiography of Africa. Students can switch between various European countries (Belgian, French or UK) to see which countries were colonized when and by whom and when students use the hotlink tool on a particular country, a pop up window describes the country name, capital city, independence date, population, area, and government type. If the user wants to know more about a particular country, a Wikipedia link is also provided. Hotlink tool works the same way for the points of interest layer. Students can also view deserts and rivers of Africa. A dynamic user interface created using JAVA and the MOJO software package has been included in this tool for effective learning. Typical user interface features are provided in this tool such as zoom-in, zoom-out, a legend editor, location identifier, print command, map tips, measure, and query builder. GIS technologies like MapObjects - JAVA edition and j2sdk were used along with the Eclipse IDE to develop this tool. The tool can run standalone and the user just needs to have JRE install on his system.
