We will design a knowledge based media system for school groups visiting Artis zoo. At the moment children in the first few years of secondary school that are visiting the zoo will be handed a question sheet. These questions are designed to encourage the child to actively participate in the experience and learn about topics connected with the zoo and it's animals. At the same time these questions enable the group's tutors to subsequently asses the level of participation of the pupils.
There are several problems with this way of assessing pupil participation. Firstly, these question sheets are perceived to be rather dull and boring by most students and therefor are not very encouraging to actively participate. Secondly, pupils can easily cheat on these sheets by copying their answer from other pupils. To address these problems we will build a system to facilitate an alternative task for the pupils which is less dull and more encouraging to participation. This task will consist of taping mini-presentations about, and making photographs of, animals and topics connected to those animals and the zoo, using a device provided especially for this purpose. The pupils will be assisted in this task by a knowledge system containing some information about the zoo and it's animals.
The knowledge in the knowledge base has to be presented in some manner to the children whilst they are in the zoo. The presentations that are made while in the zoo should be linked to entries in the knowledge base of the animal or topic that the presentation is about. They should also be coupled to the students which made the presentations. Tutors should be able to monitor the progress of the pupils. The entire knowledge base and the media produced by the pupils should afterwards be presented to the school in some form, possibly in the form of a set of web pages.
This project consists of at least the following:
* the KnowledgeBase (which includes the knowledge representation)
* the KnowledgePresentation? (how will the knowledge base be presented to the students?)
* the MultiMediaRecordingDevice
* the TasksForPupils
We have received the following CommentaryOnProposal by Frank Knack.