Abstract:

During the last years smartphones and the internet had a deep impact on our daily life as well as on learning and teaching in schools. There are a lot of tools for eLearning and webpages with the possibility to create learning material and to organize the process of teaching and learning. The number of learning and teaching apps for phones or tablet PCs is also rising. After using and comparing some relevant tools our conclusion was, that all of them were missing different core aspects of a good useable learning tool. These core aspects were collected from interviews with teachers and students from schools and university as well. They form the requirements for our software project ULTT, a multi-platform teaching and learning tool developed by using the game creation system Unity and the server framework node.js. "Multi-platform" means that the tool will be available as webpage for the use on a PC and as app for smartphones or tablet PCs running Android operating system or iOS. This feature is one of the core aspects because it allows teachers to comfortably create material on a PC and the students can use their own devices to fulfill tasks, read texts and ask questions in the class-forum. That means two different user-classes, teacher and students, with different requirements and use-cases are necessary for the tool. Each user can take the role of a teacher and create a class, develop own tasks like puzzles, quizzes or reading exercises, and publish them to make it accessible for the other users of the class. Cooperative tasks are a special type of tasks, which allow students to work together simultaneously on the same task. A teacher can provide different additional materials like texts or videos which are not included in the tasks. Furthermore, he/she gets a statistical overview on the achievement of the students. This paper reports on the development process and first experiences of teachers and students including a qualitative evaluation.

Keywords:

e-learning, multi-platform tool, software project.