AIDA - AN INTEGRATED AUTHORING ENVIRONMENT FOR EDUCATIONAL SOFTWARE

This paper describes an integrated authoring environment, AIDA (Ambien te Integrado de Desenvolvimento de Aplicacoes educacionais). It is an open tool, giving the author a high degree of freedom both in package characteristics and design methodologies used. This environment integr ates several modules. The core of the design module is a prototyping t ool, allowing the creation of evolutionary prototypes. These prototype s can include several types of multimedia components and can be used a s part of the final package. The AIDA environment also includes other options that support evaluation, learning materials re-use, communicat ion between authoring team members and translation and cultural adapta tion of packages to work in different environments. An experimental ve rsion of this authoring environment was implemented and the results of its evaluation are encouraging. In this paper we also present an exam ple of a package created with the AIDA authoring environment.