An Interactive Elementary Tutoring System for Oral Health Education Using an Augmented Approach

Abstract

The conventional elementary education system in India is mostly guided by formal content development, focusing on areas like math, language, science and social-science. Children tend to retain very little knowledge about other important areas of learning like heath care, which needs to be developed in their foundation years. The education on oral health is one such example which is not given the focus they ought to be. Considering its importance in early education, we propose a learning environment where children would gain knowledge through constant interaction with an intelligent tutoring system. The system addresses the challenges in developing a learning environment for children by introducing audio-visual effects, 3D animations and customizing the tutoring process to provide user-controlled pace of learning. It also employs the Wii Remote for imparting a tangible hardware interaction with the interface. This paper describes the proposed system and the studies conducted on treatment and control groups to evaluate its efficacy and compare the learning outcome at various domains. Experimental results depict positive effects on learning in the proposed technology-enhanced environment and paves a way for the deployment of more interactive, technology-driven learning process in the elementary education system.