A prototype application for helping to teach how to read numbers

Abstract

Nowadays we see several multimedia math applications in support of teaching the basic operations, geometric analysis, algebra and other complex operations; however there's no math application for the children at starting school age that helps to teach how to read a number in Portuguese. The <i>Laboratory for Speech Processing, Electro Acoustics, Signals and Instrumentation</i> (LPF-ESI) at the <i>Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto</i> (FEUP), started a project using a text-to-speech (TTS) engine and a Visual Basic multimedia application in order to fulfil that gap.<br>A prototype has been produced, called "<i>A Quinta dos Números</i>" (AQN) (<i>The Farm of Numbers</i>), that intends to create a bridge between engineering, computer science and pedagogy, using psycho-pedagogic concepts inherent to the teaching of maths, artificial intelligence, speech/text processing and multimedia systems, as scientific basis. Develop to help the teacher to consolidate the student's knowledge and to support a progressive evaluation of her/his performance, AQN offers a multimedia interaction with speech synthesis and text boxes. It allows a greater accessibility at the same time it will offer a wide choice of didactic games, with learning and evaluation aims.