What education-themed webapp should I build?

October 9, 2009 3:19 AM

What education-themed webapp should I build?

I need to build a webapp as part of learning a new programming language and it would be nice if the end product was useful to someone. A few of my friends who are teachers have suggested that I do something that would be helpful for teachers - like a wordsearch generator, etc. I know we have a few teachers here on MeFi - does anyone have any suggestions? Any tedious tasks that could be made easier?

Part of the reason I'm asking here is that I suspect traditional classroom activities vary greatly from country to country. For instance I recently found out that bingo games are popular classroom activities in the USA, which I never would have guessed - in the UK, bingo is strongly associated with old women and gambling, and it would be very odd to find it in the classroom. So please give your suggestions even if you think they're obvious.

posted by primer_dimer to education (2 answers total)

In many classrooms students have responsibilities that a well-designed schedule app could help with. It's less fun than word searches and bingo, but I suppose it could be useful for teachers and possibly the students themselves.
posted by The Winsome Parker Lewis at 7:28 AM on October 9, 2009

My uncle in-law is an educator in VT that works with children with autistism and special needs. It takes effort - constant effort to teach them letters, numbers and shapes.

As an oversimplification, the administration gave the special ed instructors iTouches and told them to use for the classroom. He downloaded a few maze games and let the kids play with them as a reward/teaching tool. The reward of completing a simple game - repetatively again and again and again - *FORCED* the kids to be able operate in a maze. They loved to play with the mazes and develop their coordination. Afterwards, the kids could draw out the maze on paper - from memory - no problem...

And he wondered:
if we used this to teach these things, would the kids be able to write better.

Game: Mouse Driven, same sort of points reward - letters, numbers, shapes - stay in the line. Teaching kids with special needs to make the lines in order, direction and correct form would help him emmensely...

Bonus points if you wrote it so it would work on an iTouch...

Seriously - he'd love you...
posted by Nanukthedog at 8:36 AM on October 9, 2009 [1 favorite]