The Magic System: An ambient edutainment system for the young children

Abstract

This thesis presents an ambient edutainment system that targets the young children and helps them gain knowledge while having fun. The main idea of the system is that children will learn about new objects by either spelling the names of these objects or by tapping over them, and get in response a set of multimedia output related to these objects. For this purpose, we have implemented two approaches. The first approach is based on a voice recognition engine that detects children's speech, maps their unclear words to an appropriate pre-defined match, and provides the system with an accurate term in order to retrieve the appropriate media. Now the second approach is based on the concept of tangible computing. For this purpose, we designed a tangible user interface called "Magic Stick" that reads the tag identifications attached to entities and objects, and then maps them to their pre-defined terms. We incorporated three games that allow children of different ages to benefit from the system's functionalities and encourage them to interact with it.