Conclusions

Final status report

The GGBooks project is designed for grandparents and grandchildren to communicate with each other by creating voice recordings of books from the ICDL website and then listening to the records of one another.

GGBooks Interface

The GGbooks interface has been completely implemented locally. However, due to technical constraints, we were not able to fully integrate a database into the GGBooks interface. Therefore, some of the interface’s features have limited functionally. The following functional tasks can be performed in the GGBooks interface:

• Login of the registered grandparent or grandchild.
• Registration of new a grandparent or grandchild account.
• Uploading pictures to the website.
• Accessing the International Children Digital Library (ICDL) website for the purpose of reading books and stories.
• Recoding stories.
• Help for the recording page.
• Listening to recorded stories.
• Deleting recorded stories.
• Drawing pictures.
• Posting messages for each user.
• Reading messages.
• Additional feedback to help users in each stage.

Future work possibilities report

The GGBooks interface was implemented in Macromedia Flash 8 and Flash Communication Server MX but was not connected to a database (as was permitted by Dr. Shneiderman). In the future we would like to create a “Web Application” in Microsoft Visual Studio .NET which would be connected to a database to store all data on a database instead of storing them locally. This will allow full functionality of grandparents and grandchildren being able to log in and view their personal information such as personal messages and previous recorded stories.

Another improvement that can be done to the website is to implement the custom font size setting to work directly with the individual pages. It would also be nice to incorporate Multilanguage features in order to be consistence with the ICDL website and to provide universal usability.  

Recommendations to future developers of GGBooks

The ability of saving/downloading recorded stories on users’ personal computers and also uploading recorded stories to interface from users’ personal computers could be added to GGBooks interface. This would make it easy for users to record stories on their personal computer and then upload them onto the GGBooks interface.

Downloading stories from the GGBooks interface would enable users to listen to and record stories whenever they wanted to on their personal computers.

Finally a sharing system could be added to the GGBooks interface that would enable grandchildren to share their own stories with their friends or other GGBooks users.