PAL: An Interactive Learning Platform for Primary Education

School education in the early years involves much drill, repetition and rote learning. The child has to learn the alphabet of the language of his education, learn vocabulary, pronunciation and elementary reading skills; be able to recognize objects, their features and relationships; and learn basic concepts and skills of arithmetic and geometry. The teaching community has developed many techniques to reduce the drudgery of drills and rote learning in early primary education such as group activities, games, songs and play-acting. However, these techniques are intense in terms of teacher-student interaction. The field of computing has the potential to contribute much to helping teachers in making early learning experience of children enjoyable and efficacious. The present work reports development of PAL - Platform for Assisted Learning. PAL is a platform for aiding understanding of concepts and learning of basic skills in areas mentioned above. Its special features are that it (1) uses open source software resources for content creation, (2) makes it fairly easy for the content authors to create their own content in a uniform manner, (3) enables content creation involving animation, audio, and video with rich interaction, and (4) enables tracking and adaptive guidance.