mercredi 27 juin 2012

Language Help inside the courses

There are 2 main aspects to the Ecuisine project :
  1. Teaching the basics in cooking 
  2. Teaching the basics in language to prepare students for a work placement abroad
To achieve that, each course contains 2 layers :
  1. the cooking course
  2. a language help
This language help comes in the form of :
  • a glossary of the terms that are used in the cooking course (we, French, decided to call it "Dico")
  • and a quiz to help students get familiar with and memorize this vocabulary.
We're currently working hard on these glossaries for our test course. Here's what it will probably look like.

Screen capture of the glossary in the language help module
On the left side is the list of the words to learn.

On the right is a nice, yummy and zoomable picture to illustrate the meaning and reinforce memorization. As one of my mentor puts it "Something to which you can hang the word to."

On the center is the "definition" of the word.

For now it only has the English translation but it will soon feature the German and Polish translations.

We also added a couple of exemples with their translations.

Our Scottish partner Anniesland College will proof read the English parts and the other partners will translate in German and Polish.

You can't quite here it from where you are but we will also reccords the entries (fleurer, fondu, pâte,...) so that students learn to recognize the word and get familiar with the sounds of French and their graphical representation.

All this was made using Articulate Engage, quite a bit of electricity and our brains.

This is such an exciting adventure !

... though I'm afraid I've gained a few extra pounds since I started working on this project ^_^