A Multimedial Education Tool for Qatar’s History

History education at schools assumes a mostly linear view of time. However, real-world history features highly interwoven causal relations. Efforts to remedy this shortcoming aim at providing tools and education to history teachers so they can deliver their content in a multimedial fashion. As a result, ready-made multimedia software to comprehensively teach history are scarce to non-existent. This project aims at designing and driving further a novel, interactive educational software being prototyped at the College of Science and Engineering. The software will provide school students with a rich, immersive, and deeply interconnected tool to explore Qatar’s history. In collaboration with the Middle East Department of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, we aim to create a database of facts and stories with spatiotemporal indexing. Content will be solicited from leading experts in the field. Through an interactive and intuitive interface, students can select data through a collection of linked views (data brushing). The result is a rich multimedia user experience going beyond retrieving the same content online or from books. The resources granted in this first cycle of HBKU’s Thematic Research Grant will be used to develop novel educational multimedia interfaces using tracked 3D screens and head-mounted displays.

Hamad Bin Khalifa University (HBKU)