We will be working to create a program from Mrs. Lynch's kindergarten class at Vartan Gregorian Elementary School. Due to funding cuts, computer use and education are no longer part of the curriculum, so Mrs. Lynch wants a program her students can use on their computers at home. Mrs. Lynch says that computer access is virtually universal for her students outside of the classroom. This program is an attempt to reinforce a concept that is often difficult for some of her students to grasp, especially since English is not the first language for a majority of her students.

The goal of the program is to reinforce spelling and word recognition using the method of word-families that Mrs. Lynch uses in her classroom. Students are given a word-family such as "_AT" and are prompted for words in this family such as mat, fat, hat, cat, and brat. The prompting will be done either by a visual cue, such as a picture of a cat, or by an audio cue, such as the word "cat" read aloud. The response of the program will be base on whether the answer given by the student is correct and will provide explanations along the way. There will be an element of exploration in the program so students can play with the words and gain familiarity.

Because the audience for this program is kindergarten children, one of our main goals is to design a program that they can use and understand easily. We also realize that this program will be competing with the video games and computer games they use at home so it will need to be engaging and entertaining while still fulfilling its purpose. The program will incorporate flashy animation to engage the students and it will have a game component with high scores and victory celebrations to motivate them.

Main Considerations:
1. Since this is a program designed primarily for use on home computers, we have no control or knowledge about the environment. It is necessary for the program to be downloadable from the Internet and to be platform-independent.
2. Mrs. Lynch has a packet of word-families and specific words that she covers in her class. We will use this list as a basis for the content of our program.
3. The audience is very young so the interface must be a simple ?click-and-drag? that they can master easily so the focus is on learning new words almost immediately.
4. Because the program is for home use, the interface must be engaging and flashy to compete with other activities they may have access to (i.e. video games, computer games, television, and game-boys).
5. There are varying levels of previous knowledge and ability in Mrs. Lynch's classroom and we want to create a program that will reward all levels of achievement and continue to challenge and encourage all students.

Goals and Plans:
1. We plan to make several visits to Mrs. Lynch's classroom to get an idea for how the students normally interact in class and with the teacher. We hope to figure out what type of interface will engage them as well as teach them effectively.
2. There will need to be some testing with the students. There are computers available at the school that we can use for this purpose. We hope to be able to try out our ideas with the students throughout the development process.
3. In addition to helping students learn words and word-families the way they do in school, we hope to add some aspects that will make the program different from the in-class experience to which they are already exposed.