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Description
In today's computer age, the focus of high school teachers is slowly shifting to more interactive teaching methodologies as opposed to a typical lecture format. Computer aided teaching enables teachers to engage the students to the subject material in a more successful manner and also increases kid's desire and motivation to learn. One challenge faced by some teachers is the need of interactive teaching software that is easily customizable, configurable to fit the needs of both teachers and students and also supports creativity. This thesis project attempts to find a solution for one topic in a way that can transfer to some other topics. A Map Based Teaching Aid is an audio-visual map based GIS tool that facilitates teaching through the use of interactive maps. It attempts to engage the students to the subject by providing information overlaid on various maps that the student can interact with. The current unit being prepared as part of this project is tailored to give information on Global Warming and its affects all over the world. Various places that have shown some evidence of global warming are identified as hotspots by this tool. These hotspots are dynamically overlaid as points over the map and the students can interact with the hotspots to get audio and visual information regarding global warming effects in the area. The students have the capability to research and add new hotspots and also dynamically add pictures to the existing hotspots. This tool is accompanied by a custom web page that provides detailed information on global warming, its impacts, controversial theories surrounding it and various online links to games, videos and quizzes to capture interests of the students towards global warming. This tool also integrates the Java Speech API with the MOJO (Map Objects with Java Edition) tool provided by ESRI. This enables all the information regarding hotspots to be delivered in an audio fashion also to further capture the interest of the students.
