Educational Website

The website that I choose is www.iknowthat.com.

It is during our regular project meeting that I first know about this website. We went through the animations in the math category and the math problems come up along with the plot development of the well-designed animation stories and everyone was amused by the funny stories.

Now when I relearn from the website, I find that it is a well-made learning website for children. It provides many subjects, like arts, language arts, math, social studies and so on and all the subjects have different contents for different grades beginning from pre-kindergarten. Under each subject, there are different settings that teach different contents. Let us take math for example. When the “math” button on the left side is clicked, many games are shown in the central part of the screen and ready to be played. If the mouse is put on a picture, words will replace the animation picture to tell you what this game is about, either computation or geometry, or arithmetic problems, or word problems. When you choose one and click the “play button” under the picture, you are brought to a journey with the cute animation hero called “Leon”, with whom you will experience interesting things, as well as difficulties which are made of math problems of the kind that you have chosen. The animations are well-designed with beautiful colors, many kinds of animals and attractive and funny plots. By helping him solve the problems, you can move on with the story and finally see how many problems you have got right and which ones you have got wrong. The program incorporates the boring learning process into interesting animation stories. Thus attractiveness of the learning process is increased and children will get more motivated in solving problems and learning knowledge.

Besides the high-quality game design, it provides more. We can see that it gives the space for the teacher-parent communication, so that the child’s progress can be known to both the teacher and parents at the first time. Also, children can take systematic quizzes here to examine how much they have mastered. It also provides help to their homework.

How to make it better? For certain that it is an excellent learning website, but it also has things to improve. For instance, it may be better if it can include instructions before the games. Though it includes the “teacher guide” part, the teaching is separated from the game part. This design is OK for students who already mastered the knowledge in a certain area and use the game to consolidate what they have learned, but for those who want to learn new knowledge from this website, it may be better if there are instructions proceeding the game to teach them the new things.