IJRIT International Journal of Research in Information Technology, Volume 2, Issue 4, April 2014, Pg: 292- 298
International Journal of Research in Information Technology (IJRIT) www.ijrit.com
ISSN 2001-5569
An Educational Android Application for Aakash Tablets for Providing Primary Hindi Language Education Suruchi Singh1, Shridhar Mishra2, Momin Irfan3, Prof. R. A. Agrawal4 and Prof. D. D. Patil5 1, 2, 3,
Bachelor of Engineering Students, Department of Computer Science &Engineering 4, Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science & Engineering 5, Associate Professor and Head of Computer Science & Engineering Department Hindi Seva Mandal's, Shri Sant Gadge Baba College of Engineering & Technology, Bhusawal – 425203, Dist – Jalgaon, Maharashtra, India.
[email protected],
[email protected] [email protected] [email protected] 4
[email protected] 5
ABSTRACT The rate of Literacy is an important indicator of a society’s overall Country development. The population of India, as in most other developing countries is concentrated in the rural areas. However, the rural areas of India are often at a disadvantage within the Indian Education System. The absence of good school infrastructure like improper facilities and lack of teaching staff is one of the main issues affecting literacy rate in India. There are shortages of classrooms to accommodate all the students in 2006–2007. In addition, today also there is no proper sanitation in most of schools. When children do get educated, the general lack of economic progress in the state i.e. governmental jobs are the only alternative option to farm labor, yet these jobs, in practically, require bribes to secure, which poorer families cannot afford. This leads to educated youths working on the farms or as labor work, much as uneducated peoples ones do, and leads to their parents to think a question the investment of sending children to school. An educational system called to reduce rural adult illiteracy using advancements in technology is proposed here. Such a system can be used to make up for lack of qualified persons and adequate infrastructure in rural areas. The device proposed here is an interactive Tablet (Aakash tablet for rural areas), which is capable of teaching Hindi language. We propose to develop interactive educational application which can run on the tablet or any android based phone. The application helps the user to learn to write as well as practice the alphabets. Initially the application teaches numbers, alphabets and then moves onto words. Keywords: - Tablet, android, literacy, rural, educational
I. INTRODUCTION The first census of independent India was held in 1952 showed that of the 356 million people, 298.3 million were illiterates. Thus illiteracy was one of the major obstacles in the development of the country at that time. Due to the lack of significant improvement in the state of literacy in India, during the late 1980s, the then Prime Minister of India, Mr. Rajiv Gandhi laid the foundation for the National Literacy Mission. Because of
IJRIT International Journal of Research in Information Technology, Volume 2, Issue 4, April 2014, Pg: 292- 298
this, during the decade 1990-2000 rate of literacy was increased by 13.17%. According to the 2011 census of India, the rate of literacy is 74.64%. However, this literacy rate of India is far short of international standards, which can be seen from Table I. Most of India’s population is concentrated in the rural parts of the country. According to the 2001 Census of India, 72.22% of the total population of India is in the rural parts of the country. The literacy rate of urban India is 79.9%, while that of rural India is only 58.7%. Thus rural India, where the majority of the population is concentrated has a much lower literacy rate than urban India. We believe that technology can help in achieving the goal of improving this literacy situation. Bangladesh, another South Asian country, has a similar literacy scenario as that of India. Technology was used to implement a distance education program to improve the literacy situation in rural Bangladesh. In India too, many projects have been implemented which makes use of technology, in which television sets were used to teach languages with the help of subtitles and also school children were taught English with the help of interactive cell phone games. Still the problem of literacy prevails, especially among the adults of the country. So, the proposed tablet based educational system, called “EduPad”, can considerably reduce the literacy problem in an interactive way than the conventional class room system.
II. PROBLEM DEFINITION India has a total literacy rate of 74.64%, male literacy rate of 82.14% and female literacy rate of 65.46% according to the 2011 census. Thus, it can be concluded from following graph.
Graph 1: - Literacy Rate In India from 1951-2011 The literacy rate is far short of the international standards .The provisional population totals of Census of India 2011 puts the illiterates (aged 7 and above) at 272,950,015.According to the UNESCO’s Education For All (EFA) Global Monitoring Report 2011, India was home to 283,105,000 illiterates (aged 15 and over) in the year 2008, out of the 795,805,000 adult illiterates around the world. Thus India accounts for 35.57 % of the global adult illiterate population (aged 15 and over), making it home to the largest population of illiterates. Thus India should be a major region of focus for any project aiming to improve the global literacy scenario. Illiteracy is caused by several factors. Lack of primary education is one of the major causes of illiteracy. Research as shown that the access to primary education depends on the wealth of the family. All else being equal, a child from a household from the highest quintile is 31 percentage points more likely to be in school than a child from a poor quintile Another factor influencing the access to primary education in rural areas of India is the land owning pattern. Children of families with small/marginal holdings are of enforced to do manual labor, which lead these children to become illiterates. The situation is further aggravated by the fact that the landless poor are the ones belonging to the historically marginalized lower castes and are thus denied the opportunities to a better standard of life. The graph shown above gives a comparison of the adult and Youth literacy rates of India with the rest of the world (source: EFA Global Monitoring Reports). From graph, we can see that the adult literacy
IJRIT International Journal of Research in Information Technology, Volume 2, Issue 4, April 2014, Pg: 292- 298
rate in India is only 63%, which is far low when compared with the rest of the world which is 83%. It can be seen from Table II that the youth literacy of India is considerably higher when compared with the adult literacy. This is mainly due to the various projects that have been undertaken by the Government of India and NGOs for improving literacy. Still, a high percentage of the adults in India are illiterate and thus we have to come up with a solution to reduce this problem of illiteracy.
III. MOTIVATION EDUPAD opens doors to opportunities and we proved standards of living. It empowers individuals to be active members of the local, national and global community. On the other hand illiteracy traps people in poverty and reduced opportunities. Around the world, technology based project for improving literacy has been implemented, such as ICT 4 IE(Information and Communication Technologies for Illiteracy Eradication in Egypt, which aims at converting literacy study material into simple interactive computer based tutorials designed for both classroom and self study. ICT for Illiteracy Eradication has been met with considerable success. In a similar way Edupad is designed to reduce the problem of adult literacy. In a similar way we thought of developing “EDUPAD” – An Educational Application for AAKASH tablets designed to reduce the problem of adult literacy in rural as well as urban areas of the country. Many of these applications may or may not be available in the market to provide primary education to all. For Example: there may be many applications which will help in the growth of literacy rate (or may be helpful in providing primary education) but they are platform dependent. In order to give pupils the primary education, some education/information has to be provided to access the particular device through which the primary education should be provided. Here we have chosen AAKASH tablets since it is available in low cost and easy to access. Once a application is installed it can create many opportunities for completion of our goal.
IV. SYSTEM DESCRIPTIONS The heart of our project is the Android based tablet. Basically we have chosen AAKASH tablet since it is having low cost and many features. Its cost is approximately 1400 – 1800 under subsidized by the Government of India for Students. A tablet is basically a portable mobile/computer which has a touch screen as its primary input and is easy to handle and transport. The traditional Tablet was the Microsoft Tablet pc, which was designed to work for the Microsoft XP Tablet PC edition Operating system. Android tablets are chosen because it is an open source operating system that supports a wide range of applications. Many tablets have already been designed to work on the android platform are easily available in the market at reasonable prices.
REQUIREMENTS This application requires any Android based device such as AAKASH Tablet which has an 8”resistive multi-touch screen, a 667MHz processor, 128MB RAM and 2GB storage memory. The tablet should have a battery which can give back up of up to 6-7 hours. Apart from the tablet, there has to be additional loud speaker, which will be connected to it. It is more economical to have external laud speakers, than integrated ones which increase the price of tablets. Such a system has the required specification for running the software which we have to design for the implementation. We have to develop a software application that can run on the android tablets, which will help the user of the tablet to learn. The application will be developed using the Android SDK.SDK is a software development kit that will enable us to create application for the android platform. The SDK will require eclipse (a software development environment), jdk (java development Kit) and Android Development Tools plug in. The Android architecture shown in fig consists of Linux Kernel which contains all Suruchi Singh, IJRIT
295
IJRIT International Journal of Research in Information Technology, Volume 2, Issue 4, April 2014, Pg: 292- 298
the different drivers such as the display driver, flash memory driver, the audio driver and the power management. There are also different libraries such as SQlite, Libc and OpenGL. The architecture also consist of the Android Runtime, which contains a set of core libraries Next is the Application Framework, which consist of the Activity Manager, Content Providers, package manager and Resource Manager of the operating system. At the top of the architecture is the application software.
Figure 1: Android Architecture V. METHODOLOGY We observed persons in Indian rural areas environments in order to obtain insights in to the design of this application. Persons were observed in drawing, writing, listening, recognition and situations that invoked logical thinking. Also the team observed their attention span and the properties of objects or things that attract their attention most. Agile methodology was followed in order to cater to the need of delivering high quality, working software product in order to stay current with the mobile technology wave. This approach is typically used in software development when there is significant that the development team should be able to accommodate and respond to the varying customer needs during the development. Agile methodology was suitable for research based products due to its capacity to facilitate changes anytime. Since all the requirements formed in to user stories it is easy to understand what to do and the relations between each task.
Persons training learning system (PTLS): The development in one learning domain affects development in other domains. For e.g., a person's language skill affect his/her ability to engage in different social interaction works. Therefore, the dynamic interaction for all areas of development must be considered. The PTLS facilitates connectivity between learning domains. Example: while person learns the numbers, he/she can recognize and familiar with the natural objects (animals, fruits, Trees etc). Persons generally like bright colors, colorful backgrounds and nice sound clips in common with effects. PTLS presents such things throughout the application or software. Nice different backgrounds and sound clips have been used to teach letters, numbers and words and also give practice. Each person grows and develops skills and competencies at their own pace. Some person's may have developmental delays. PTLS allows all persons to practice with what they do not know well. PTLS ensures that the persons will not feel bored, because of its attractive looks and features.
IJRIT International Journal of Research in Information Technology, Volume 2, Issue 4, April 2014, Pg: 292- 298
VI. IMPLEMENTATION This application is being proposed to be used in way so that learning Hindi language would be interesting and enjoyable for this purpose; we develop a software application that can teach the alphabets in an interactive way. This software will contain all the numbers from 1 to 20, alphabets and also making words with pronunciation. The Application first shows a substantiation of how numbers are present in Hindi language. The sound of Number will be pronounced by the Application after the substantiation; similarly this process is done for alphabets, making words and also at the end practice session is there to practice the words. The Application will give to user an opportunity to practice writing the alphabet on the tablet using our finger by tracing over the outline of the alphabet and numbers which will be already present on the screen? After finishing one alphabet, the user can move onto the next one. The user can come back to the previous alphabet and see the substantiation over again. In the first phase of the application, alphabets will be Numbers. In the later phases the user will be able to learn words and sentences.
Figure 2: Home Window Of Application
Figure 3: Number Learning
Figure 4: Alphabet Learning
Figure 5: Word Formations
IJRIT International Journal of Research in Information Technology, Volume 2, Issue 4, April 2014, Pg: 292- 298
VII. ACKNOWLEDGMENT It is a great opportunity for us to express our profound gratitude towards our H.O.D, Prof. D. D. Patil whose zeal & enthusiasm are source of inspiration for us. Also, we can't ignore the innumerable efforts undertaken by Prof. R. A. Agrawal, our Project Guide, Department of Computer Science & Engineering, for his minute intricacies with constantly involving himself in our project devoting his valuable time and we especially thank to Prof. A. P. Ingale, our Project Incharge for his guidance and motivations. We would also like to thank all the staff members of Department of Computer Science & Engineering, Shri Sant Gadge Baba College of Engineering & Technology, Bhusawal, for their valuable assistance and support at all times.
VIII.CONCLUSION India is a country where the problem of literacy still prevails especially in rural areas where people can’t know to write their name. We believe that this android based educational system will help the illiterate people of rural India to become literate through an interactive and enjoyable method at least they know the calculation without affecting their day to day life. At least they know how much amount they get per hours therefore people at high post fraud to these people. We choose Aakash tablet because it is very low in price and people in today world they want more comfortable in mobile devices. Most of the illiterate people of rural India rely on manual labor for their living and sometime due to their laborious work they unable to attend regular study classes. So, the Educational Android Application can be a convenient method for the rural India to become literate. Hence in order to solve these problems, we have proposed to develop Educational Android Application, which help in resolving the rural illiteracy problems. Also, we have planned to develop and launch this application till May/June 2014, which will be open source and easily available to all the users across the globe.
IX.REFERENCES [1] Md. Shafiqul Alam, “Technology based Literacy Education Through Distance Mode in Bangladesh: Problems and Prospects” [2] EFA Global Monitoring Report, 2011. [3] Census of India 2011, Office of Registrar General of India. [4] Ritu Dangwa, “Public Computing, Computer Literacy and Educational Outcome: Children and Computers in Rural India,” Proceeding of the 2005 conference on onwards Sustainable and Scalable Educational Innovations Informed by the Learning Sciences: Sharing Good Practices of Research, Experimentation and Innovation. [5] Matthew Kam, Anuj Kumar, Shirley Jain, Akhil Mathur, and John Canny, “Improving Literacy in Rural India: Cell phone Games in an After-School Program,” Proceeding in ICTD'09 Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on Information and communication technologies and development. [6] Brij Kothari, Avinash Pandey, Amita R Chudgar, “Reading out of the ‘idiot box’: Same-language subtitling on Television in India,” In journal of Information Technologies and International Development Volume 2 Issue 1, Sept 2004. [7] Filmer, D., and L. Pritchett. 1999,"The Effect of Household Wealth on Educational Attainment: Evidence from 35 Countries."
Suruchi Singh, IJRIT
298
