Work in progress: Design of a visual learning tool for Japanese

Learning Japanese is important for engineering students to be able to work in Japanese companies and to share Japanese technical know how. Learning technical Japanese is very difficult because it consists of complex Kanjis (Chinese characters). This project concentrates on the development of the students' ability to learn Kanji. In this project we developed a tool that will help students to understand and remember Japanese Kanjis. The program design is based on flash animation. Through this learning tool, students will be introduced to the order in which the strokes of a character should be written. This tool also consists of some interactive activities that will enable the students to evaluate their learning - multiple-choice questions on quizzes of stroke orders of the Kanji characters - with instant feedback. Continuous evaluation will be carried out to determine the learning effectiveness of the tool and to enhance the quality of the product.