Designing and Developing a Prototype of Parents and Teachers Communication Application for Early Childhood

Abstract

The purpose of this project is to develop Parents and Teachers Communication (PTC) application for early childhood. An application development process has three phases. The first phase is application design phase: the questionnaire had been used to investigate the main requirements from the users (teachers and parents). The application’s function comparison was another method which had been applied in design phase. Five school communication applications had been compared to find for strong features in each application. Human factors engineering was used for designing PTC application’s user interfaces in order to understand user capabilities and limitations. The second phase was application coding phase: PTC application was developed under IOS operation system by using the X-CODE program. The third phase was application usability study phase: in this phase, the usability study test was measured in two steps. First, the System Usability Scale (SUS) was distributed to 10 volunteers during application development. Second, another usability test was done by an adopted SUS questionnaire. It was distributed to 6 volunteers after they had experience with PTC application about two week period. Results showed that PTC application had high usability scale during application development (SUS, 85) and after four weeks experience (adopted SUS, 80). SUS during application development showed that PTC application was in excellent usability scale. The adopted SUS questionnaire can be interpreted that users have a great experience with PTC application. Parent-Teacher communication application for early childhood could assist to decrease cap of communication between home and school efficiently.