My Final Year Project – Interactive Educational Website

I recently came across the PDF write-up and ISO CD Image of my Final Year Project. It was for the Bachelor of Technology (Education) in Materials and Construction degree, which I completed in 2003 in the University of Limerick.

Introduction

An interactive educational website was designed and developed to increase a students visualisation and spatial abilities. The topic of orthographic projection was the main focus of the educational website. Other websites at the time lacked interactivity. The website developed for this project had multiple choice questions and an interactive drawing board where a student could test their visualisation abilities through task based problem solving. 3D models and animations also featured throughout the website.

Students results were saved to a database, allowing them to check their progress and also allowing a teacher to login and view students progress. A paper based pre-test and post-test was designed and given to students before and after spending time using the educational website. Statistical information on students progress was discussed. It was concluded that this interactive educational website enhanced students visualisation abilities and knowledge on orthographic projections which also provided for effective and enriched student learning and outcomes. This was achieved by using virtual reality three-dimensional models, controllable animations, everyday models and interactive assessment methods.

Technology Used

There was a lot of technology and setup which went into this interactive website. 3D Models were designed in SolidWorks and animated using Studio Max. The main content of the website was static html. The multiple-choice questions and interactive drawing exercises were served using Tomcat. As this had to be piloted in schools where there may not have been any Internet, a Live CD was created which on-top of windows would auto-run Tomcat and hsqldb. This could be run on a teachers computer, and students could then browse to http://teacherscomputername:8080 and login to the website.

There was an Interactive Drawing Assessment section which was particularly innovative. A video of this can be seen below. If you want to experience and give this a try, feel free to download the ISO, burn it to a CD and pop it into your computer to auto-run. The CD should auto-run, and work on XP,Vista,Windows7. I can’t take full credit for developing this Java app however, and that goes to my brotherwho done a good deal of the back-end code.

A few years ago I recoded the Interactive website in PHP and MySQL and made it available online. You can visit the Interactive Geometry Website here. Unfortunately however it does not contain this Interactive Drawing Assessment section. You’ll need the Live CD to use that.

FYP Write-up

For those of you who are interested in reading more, I’ve put a PDF of the complete FYP write-up. You can see the image of the CD I printed out on the original also.

If anyone has any comments or questions, you can email me (stephen at sburke.eu)
If you are going to reference anything from this FYP Project, place a link to this page.