Use Case Title
Subscription-based learning management system to teach Chinese to children. This system has many features to provide educational content, such as books (which students can listen to and read), quizzes (different types), and assessments (to improve skills).
Target Audience
Chinese teachers, school-age children, and their parents who can participate in the learning process.
The main tasks and challenges
Especially for this project our team created parsing (conversion) functionality so that when visualizing a book, the user could listen to the narrator’s voice and interact with hieroglyphs (highlight, listen to pronunciation variations, add a word to the notebook).
To synchronously highlight the symbols relative to audio we parse/convert books in PDF format to HTML, CSS, and JS and split an audio file into many time-stamps (the system analyzes the audio file, determines fragments with sounds (words), and distributes them into parts one by one).
Previously, another team worked on this project and used a chaotic way of development without bringing it online. We have unraveled the tangle for five months and prepared functions for the MVP version of the site with the main functionality for studying.
Solution
We have created an online platform for children to learn Chinese, which, first of all, provides teachers with the necessary content. And teachers could choose the necessary educational material for students, form and teach classes. At the same time, Chinese 12Tree is convenient and easy for children to use while learning from teachers, reading books, listening to audios, and taking tests.
In particular, the platform has two login systems: for teachers and children. Teacher accounts have a wider arsenal of functionality and resources. They buy a license to teach and organize classes (1,5 or 30 children). Also, this functionality allows teachers to choose books of different levels of difficulty for children, as well as to assess children’s abilities in reading, listening, character recognition and correct pronunciation.
If you log in to Chinese 12Tree as a child, the functionality of student accounts is more limited, but easier to use, to ensure a student’s comfortable use of the platform. Here, children have libraries with books, access to which has been enabled by teachers. A child can also read books about Chinese history, fairy tales, adventures, and also listen to Chinese songs. Another category available for the child is Grow Up, statistics. They can see how many books they read, how many audios listened, how many quizzes passed, etc.
As for admins, they are primarily responsible for the content for teachers to work with. Admins fill the library with PDF files, audio files, activate various quizzes, and provide technical support to users (for example, restoring login and password). We made a convenient interface for downloading and interacting with PDF files, as well as converting these files into HTML format. On this platform, we also introduced the Parcer system to find hieroglyphs, pictures, and other visual content in books. Admins can interact with text content, i.e. select and delete characters. After that, they can load the mp3 file, and the line for audio management appears. The system took an audio track, cut it into hundreds of pieces, and then found the sound.
The books were voiced with the help of announcers who voiced the entire book. The user had, first of all, to remove all unnecessary symbols that are not read in the audio file and display them in the correct order. After that, the user had to download the audio format that was cut and display it as well. Suppose this system cut the sound incorrectly. We could combine these two sounds. That is, combine so that the entire word is read as one in its entirety.
Technologies
- PHP/Laravel
- Vue.JS
- JavaScript
- JQuery
- Elasticsearch
- MySQL
- Mailgun
- Stripe
- AWS services