AIDA: An integrated authoring environment for educational software

This paper describes an integrated authoring environment, AIDA (Ambiente Integrado de Desenvolvimento de Aplicações educacionais). It is an open tool, giving the author a high degree of freedom both in package characteristics and design methodologies used. This environment integrates several modules. The core of the design module is a prototyping tool, allowing the creation of evolutionary prototypes. These prototypes can include several types of multimedia components and can be used as part of the final package. The AIDA environment also includes other options that support evaluation, learning materials re-use, communication between authoring team members and translation and cultural adaptation of packages to work in different environments. An experimental version of this authoring environment was implemented and the results of its evaluation are encouraging. In this paper we also present an example of a package created with the AIDA authoring environment.