4.1.1.Usage patterns We expect the home-schooled children using the Mecca website to visit regularly as an integral part of their learning experience. Initially the visits will be related to the music education curriculum. Later, as the website expands its content, the home-schooled children will make increased use of the website for broader educational experiences. This will fulfill the goal of integrating music into the broader educational learning experience of the home-schooled children. Sometimes, their visits might be highly structured, perhaps completing a task assigned by their parent. This assigned viewing would be highly focused and perhaps hurried, as the child searches for the specific information requested. At other times, the children (or the parents) might simply sit down to explore a specific musical instrument, artist, or style. These explorations would be much more relaxed and thorough. Because children can have short attention spans and might only make it through short sections of the site per viewing, we expect the same information to be accessed repeatedly by the user. For example, a child might stop to listen to a sample of a particular instrument and then return the following day to read about how the instrument is built and to listen to other recordings with that instrument.
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Display details about artists, albums, and individual recordings. This is our most basic feature. Artist details will include a picture of the artist, easy to read background information, a full-text biography, and a listing of albums that the artist contributed to either as a composer or performer, or both. Album details will include a list of the recordings on the album, provide commentary on the album by various reviewers (this will primarily be of use to parents), and a picture of the album cover. Recording details will focus on the location, time, and contributing artists for each individual recording.
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Search by Artist Name, Album Name, and Song Titles. In order to access our details pages, we need a basic search function. To make the searching kid-friendly, we have designed the system with simplified searching mechanism. We use radio buttons to give the user the option of searching by artist, album, song, or lyrics. Users will enter information into a text box and select one of the categories to search, and retrieve matching results from that category. They can then select the entry that best matches the information they want, leading to a detail page about a specific artist, album, or song.
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Listen to recordings. A musical education site would neglect its mission if it did not allow and encourage users to listen to the music. For children, this is a particularly important feature. Whenever applicable, we will provide a button to listen to the music being described in the text.
4.1.3.Desired features -
Link recordings to other recordings of the same song. One fascinating aspect of music is that there are so many different ways that a single melody and lyrics can be performed. This feature will connect one recording with other recordings of the same song. Making this connection to the roots of music will teach our users about the development of music through time and the different ways that each artist can interpret a song to create a unique musical piece. In addition, this feature will connect recordings done at different times by the same artist, such as live or acoustic versions. On the recording details page, users will be able to see various recordings of the same song with listings of the artist names and recording dates for those related recordings.
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Display details about musical instruments. Connecting a child’s favorite artists with information about music is a great educational tool. On the details page of each recording, we will include a listing of instruments in that recording and links to details about those instruments. Instrument details will include information on the way the instrument is built, how it is played, musical styles that regularly use this instrument, a picture, and an audio sample.
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Advanced Search. Our users will be given the option of doing a simple search on the homepage or clicking a link to an advanced search page. This option will allow the user to combine searches from different categories and do free text searching of documents. A child may not know the name of a song, but they are much more likely to remember the chorus. Free-text searching of lyrics is essential for helping the users to find the song they want. In addition, free-text searching of biographies, album commentaries, and instrument descriptions will allow the users to retrieve documents that specifically address the subject they are studying. For example, a child might have been instructed to research the Harlem Renaissance. Entry of this term in a search box will retrieve a list of artist biographies, instruments, and albums identified with that movement.
4.1.4.Wow features -
Browse samples of instruments or musical styles. Exploration of different musical sounds is imperative in music education. We wanted to give our users the chance to browse different types of musical styles and listen to samples. This is an easy way to compare two styles and understand the similarities and differences. Along the same lines, comparing and contrasting instrument sounds is a way to learn to distinguish between different instruments. This browse feature will be a drop-down menu of different musical styles or instruments and will lead to details about the instrument or style, links to related artists or albums, and an audio file to listen to a representative sample.
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Featured artists, albums, and instruments. We expect our users to regularly return to our site, so we want to keep our homepage exciting and new for each visit. We also hope to educate our users about music that perhaps they have not heard before. Our homepage will highlight featured artists, albums, and instruments updated weekly. The featured artists will be drawn from pop, jazz, and classic jazz. This section of the homepage will provide direct links to the details and also give the user the option of listening on the homepage. For example, we might feature the Oboe one week: a picture of an oboe, a listing of artists who play the oboe, and a link to an audio sample would all be listed on the homepage. The user could then click on a link to enter the oboe’s details page. Featuring paintings of musicians by Harlem Renaissance artists will expand the features from the performing art of music to the visual arts and offer home-schooling parents a way to incorporate history, poetry, drama and other aspects of the Harlem Renaissance movement.
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Music Toolkit. This is our favorite educational tool for parents to guide the curriculum of their children. A parent can save details about particular artists, albums, instruments, or musical styles in their own “toolkit” and have their children access the information later. Features involved include a registration system to keep track of the owners of each toolkit, password-protection, and a storage area for saved details.
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Musical Cookie Crumbs. As a fun navigational technique for kids, we will show the progression of their search using Musical Cookie Crumbs on the top navigation bar. Basically, We will follow their movement through the site and use musical notation to show where they are and where they have been. This will make it easy for the users to get back to a page they have already seen before.
4.1.5.Future features -
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Interactive Band. This feature combines audio and visual learning in an interactive game. Children can click on a picture of an instrument and hear it play. By instructing the site to play multiple at once, the child learns how a real band plays together.
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Information about local resources in the user’s area. Upcoming concerts, festivals, and music education events would be listed by location. This feature would be built using a database listing location (either zip code or city, state), time and date of the event, name of the event, and a description. A search feature would allow users to enter a location and/or type of event and retrieve a listing of upcoming events. We would also like to include information about private tutors for different instruments and educational resources for home-school parents. These would also be stored in a database for ease of updating entries. Parents could search by instrument and/or location.
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Songs that teach other disciplines, e.g. math, science. This would allow the Music Education students to contribute created songs for use by the home-schooled students.
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