This paper examines the development of a Web-based multimedia learning environment, aimed at the 7 – 10 year old age group, based on the new Primary School Science syllabus.

Learning can be described as any experience that contributes to a child’s development. Some children, when introduced to something new and complex, will jump in and explore because they enjoy exploration and are good at it. Others are much more timid and will explore only if coached or guided. Others ask for instructions and follow them meticulously. Some children will carefully watch a demonstration, while others are impatient to try things themselves. Children differ and all these learning styles have their place. Even an individual child may switch styles as circumstances and experiences change.

Therefore, when developing a learning environment aimed at a certain young age group, it is important to firstly look at how that age group learns.

When designing Educational Software it is important to consider the principles of learning and then assess (at the evaluation stage) whether the software reflects these principles. [1]

There are many different learning styles and learning theories suited to children, including those of Vygotsky, Piaget and Bruner.

Piaget’s theory states that activity is central to learning.

Vygotsky’s theory states that we learn from social contact, by what we are taught and by what we observe.

Bruner introduced the concept of scaffolding, where a more expert person (or computer system) helps a less expert person.

These learning theories will be incorporated into the design of the learning environment, by use of practical examples, exercises, and animation and sound, that enrich the learning environment using multimedia.

The variety of a web-based learning environment that includes multimedia elements addresses the needs of different learning styles, thus helping to ensure that learning is enjoyable for this young age group.

The Irish curriculum for Social, Environmental and Scientific Education incorporates an exciting new Science programme for the primary school. It builds on the sound foundations of the social and environmental studies programme which schools are currently teaching and sets out a science curriculum that is broad and flexible.

The new syllabus encourages children to experience at first hand, by investigation and exploration, their natural and physical surroundings. It suggests that children should be given the opportunity to experience at first hand the wonders of living things, energy and forces and the properties and characteristics of materials. This, in theory, is an exciting and new introduction to primary schools but in reality it can be difficult to implement for a number of reasons. Field trips may not be possible and there may be health and safety issues and sometimes large class sizes.

Along with these physical constraints, the science syllabus introduces concepts that children may find difficult to understand. Conventional teaching methods or conventional media, such as paper or pictures can be ill-suited to representing these concepts in ways that make them easy to visualize.

Interactive online learning is learning through various media such as video, sound, graphics, animation and text. These media are structured in such a way that the audience has control over their presentation. Interactive learning has many advantages. These include making learning entertaining and engaging rather than passive. Sound, music, visuals, movement and speech encourage the user to participate in the learning process. Multi-sensory input provides more opportunities for engagement, interest, motivation, and retention [2].

Normal web pages, developed in HyperText Markup Language (HTML), would be ideal for simply displaying the content of the new science curriculum. HTML is a method of describing the format of documents which allows them to be viewed on computer screens [3].

HTML documents are displayed by Web browsers, programs which can navigate across networks and display a wide variety of types of information. HTML documents can consist of simple text or complex multimedia, with sound and animation. However, HTML has its limitations. Figure 1 shows an example of HTML. Since HTML’s tags (e.g. <title>) are mostly formatting-oriented, they do not give information about the content of a Web page, and thus make it hard for that information to be reused in another context [4].

For example, certain parts of the same basic content or learning material may be required to respond to different learning occasions, e.g., a lesson, a tutorial, or an exploratory exercise.

This research looks at the problem of taking an existing curriculum and implementing it as an effective web-based learning environment, where the actual content will be available for reuse.

Guidelines for teaching the new curriculum divide it into four content strands: Living Things, Energy and Forces, Materials, and Environmental Awareness [5]. The content strand to be used in this research, "Living Things", is divided into Plants and Animals.

For this content to be available for reuse, it is important to find a broad classification for Plants and Animals, one that is familiar to a wide range of people, at a wide range of global locations. Taxonomy is the science of classifying plants and animals into species and logical groups of species [6]. Using a common classification, global searches will be able to extract the exact information needed, e.g., Mammals that live in Hedgerows.

Figure 2 shows the architecture of the learning environment. The architecture is divided into three main tiers: the client tier (user), the server tier, and the middle tier (for connectivity).

A user requests information through a browser on the Internet (on the client tier). The curriculum content is stored in a database, on the server, which is accessible by the Internet through the use of the connectivity technology Active Server Pages (ASP). Once a user requests information from a browser on the client (user) side, the request is sent off to an ASP page. This ASP page accesses the database on the server and extracts the relevant information, which is then returned to the user in the required format. This can be straightforward HTML or in this case eXtensible Markup Language (XML). Presentation details will be added using Cascading Stylesheets (CSS) or eXtensible Style Language (XSL).

WebML is a modelling language for designing Web sites [7]. It is used in this research to guarantee a model-driven approach to the development of a Web-based learning environment.

WebML consists of four main perspectives:

• a Structural Model,

• a Hypertext Model,

• a Presentation Model and

• a Personalisation Model.

This research is focused mainly on the use of WebML’s Structural Model. The Structural Model is used to organise the data content of the learning environment in terms of the relevant entities and relationships between them.

Figure 3 shows the entities defined for the Structural Model. This model uses a fragment of the content strand "Living Things".

WebML is compatible with traditional database modelling techniques; therefore Entity Relationship Modelling was used here to create the Structural Model.

Two main entities (containers of data) were defined: animals and plants. Also defined were each entity’s attributes and the relationships between each entity.

The use of a taxonomy helped to define the attributes which would make each entity effective for reuse.

The entities and their attributes are used later in the implementation to:

Note the correlation between the field names in the database e.g. Name, and the XML tag names e.g. <Name> </Name>.

The XML language is the universal format for structured documents and data on the Web [8]. XML is a grammatical system for creating custom markup languages. In this research XML has been used to create a language for describing the science curriculum content.

With XML, data from databases, spreadsheets, or even applications like CAD packages can be displayed on Web pages.

HTML was designed to display data. HTML tags and HTML document structures are predefined. XML, on the other hand, was designed to describe data, and allows the author to define their own tags and their own document structure.

The central idea of XML is to keep the three main components of a document separate:

• data content, (.xml)
• structure (.dtd/.xsd)
• presentation (.xsl/.css)

XML uses a DTD (Document Type Definition) or Schema to formally describe the data. In order to display XML documents, it is necessary to have a mechanism to describe how the document should be displayed. One of these mechanisms is CSS but XSL is the preferred style sheet language of XML [9].

In this implementation the data content is the information on plants and animals, which is stored in the database. XML provides the structure using a DTD or schema. XML Stylesheets provide the presentation details.

XML was designed to describe data, i.e. meta-data. A taxonomy can also be considered as meta-data, as it provides a description of plants and animals based on their classification. Therefore, a scientific taxonomy has been used in this research as a starting point for creating an XML meta-data structure, which is further refined into tags for content description. This will make the information in the database more easily available for reuse by other web applications.

Consider a lesson that displays information about an animal. The text content of each page will be highly regular – Animal Name, Class, Habitat, Scientific Name etc. -, much of it will be common to all pages describing Animals. Thus the page will be built from a simple XML document, containing page-specific text retrieved from the database, and an XSL Stylesheet that will add presentation details.

XML tags for multimedia elements such as video clips, sound and animation can be added to enrich the learning experience.

Figure 6 shows the conversion from a taxonomy to an XML document. By using this XML document and either an XSL or a CSS, the animal information will be displayed in a browser.

Figure 6 illustrates how to store data in an XML document and subsequently display it on a web page. For this implementation, however, the information between the tags will be stored in a database and retrieved upon request. This has many advantages:

The XML data source can be populated using a script to ultimately link the users’ view to the database content. Because the XML data source is generated dynamically from the data in the database, when you update the database you also update the XML data source.

There are several methods of storing XML data. The method used for this learning environment is to store XML data in a relational database. Putting XML data in a database works on the principle of splitting the XML documents into useful fragments and storing them in table rows.

Each single XML item will be stored in a single table-row. The benefit of using this method is the possibility to identify each item and element with Structured Query Language (SQL) statements.

Using XML and XSL, the same content can be taken from the database and displayed in different formats, e.g. a straightforward lesson or a tutorial.

A relational database application such as Microsoft Access is ideal for organising, storing and viewing data. However, it can be difficult for other applications and HTML pages to access the data in the database. Because XML is a universal format that is text-based, it is easily parsed, and enables interoperability [10].

If the data in an Access database is converted into an XML data source, then other applications and HTML pages can access the data. Active Server Pages technology is used in this research to transform the database tables into an XML data source.

The following piece of code, Figure 7, is used in the implementation to connect to the database created to store the science content. It selects information from a table and displays that information between XML tags.

Once a user requests data from a browser, the

request will be sent to an ASP file. This ASP page connects to the database and retrieves the requested data using SQL code. Once the requested data is retrieved, it is then returned to the browser. It can be returned in various formats but this implementation returns the data using XML tags with XSL for presentation details.

The structure of a primary school Science curriculum can be used to create a customised markup language, thereby making the content of the curriculum available for reuse. Work to date on preparing the science syllabus for Web-based implementation promises to be a suitable framework for other syllabi.