Final_year_ Project

Week12:Friday 8th December 2006;

On Thursday night, I amended the questionnaire then emailed one copy to Tasnim and another to Ian Whiteman (Islamic artists).

Tonight finally I managed to make up my mind on the choice of my final artifact;
Which is:

A dynamic educational website for kids to learn about Islamic art and culture.

After numerous brainstorming sessions, I have settled on a project idea. However, once I was happy with my chosen idea I started to analyse and document it in order to overcome any doubts or confusions later on and to be able to highlight everything that I will need and how i will go about in achieving them. Also, I will be able to refer back and chart my progress against the following aims and objectives.

To help me with this process I asked my self the following objective questions;

• Why a website and not any other multimedia artifact?


• Why educational or dynamic and not just static website?


• Why kids and not other groups?

My answers to the above questions are;
Why a website and not any other multimedia artifact?
A particular advice that always crossed my mind whenever I sat down to choose a project was: “don’t just make a website?”. This advice was given by some of our lecturers on a number of times when guiding students in assignment projects. This somewhat discouraged me and it always gave me the impression that to make a web site for my final year project is unwise or somehow unworthy. I can understand their reservation in creating “just” a website because nowadays anyone can set up a website in few minute with the help of ready-made templates and graphical user interfaces that eliminates the need to know the intrinsic coding, even an eight year olds can create a website sometimes in no time.

However, when I thought of it deeply and asked my self the following questions, I came to the conclusion that I can adopt as a final year project a website as the main multimedia yet neutralizing my lecturers’ reservations.

First of these two questions I pondered on was does the website that is created by, lets inexperienced person or even nine or eight years old, comply to web standards, can it be read by a colour blind or totally blind people? Does it use anything like CSS or xml? The issue of web compliance is a major issue today where web content is no longer viewed through a graphical web browser. Web Standards, such as that of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) ensures that web content can be read or interpreted by assistive technologies, such as voice browsers and the like, used by the disabled and also by other viewing agents such as text only browser, mobile phones, multimedia players used by choice.

The second question was, does having a website as a medium or as an artifact serve my aim and objective? If yes then no need to go for an alternative.

I went back to analyse my aim and objectives;

Aims:

To make people particularly young kids learn about Islamic art and culture, in order to bridge gab and build a better way of coexistence.

Objectives:

To carry out a thorough research to find out how did this art developed, when and where did it start, the stages and evolution that went through

• What does Islamic art cover, its types and subtypes, and the distinguishing characters of each type.


• To find out what is the religion of Islam, when and how did start, what are the most unique characters of it?



• Who are Muslims where they live and what do they believe and who do they warship?


• To explore in details the most highly valued form of Islamic art; Arabic calligraphy


• To show or share with people from all background Muslims and non Muslims equally Islamic art and culture.


• To promote the Islamic art and culture through interactive stimulating media artifact


• To enhance my understanding and knowledge in different multimedia fields as well as learn new skills.

Sharing of information to bridge the gab, can be through a dynamic website, where kids can share their own art work with other kids. Through the site, kids will be able to post their art work and will be added to the database, then each week some of these work will be displayed. Different Artist will post new technique or idea for creating some new Islamic art. Young kids will be able to post any questions they would like to ask about Muslims and their culture and will be answered by Muslim scholars.


While exploring the art and culture of Muslims through video, text, audio and online interactive activities, I will be achieving my objectives of enhancing my multimedia skills and learning new others.

Through the creations of a website that meats web standard rules, will help me learn new programs such as Xml, and CSS.

Looking at my aims and objectives, I realized that creating a website will definitely is the solution for my problem;


Why educational, or dynamic and not just aesthetic website?

Dynamic educational website are visited more often than aesthetic website, also will allow sharing of information. Further more, I will be increasing my web skills in SQL and PHP.

Why kids and not other groups?
For the following reasons:

1. I believe that kids are the seeds of every nation, therefore, if they have a better understanding of one another, will be growing into more tolerant adult who coexist and live together in harmony.
2. Most kids are passionate about art, colouring, tracing etc, this was build on my own observation on kids as a mother and Arabic teacher.
3. A very high percentage of Muslim children are ignorant about their culture.


After being sure about the artifact, I asked my self isn’t there any website that educate children about Islamic art and culture?

Through my research and background as an Arabic teacher, i came across many site that was intended for Muslims children only, with poor design. I also found a lot of website about Islamic art and culture but not appealing to kids.

islamweb.net/kidsen

posted by Servant of Allah @ 11:58 PM