ReadMore

Abstract

"Reading is an important skill for children which plays a vital role in their education, learning, growth and development. It promotes thinking capacity for children by introducing new thoughts and ideas, aids in the modification of their personality and has many other countless benefits. Unfortunately, there has been a major decline in children’s reading habits and interest levels in the recent past. The modern-day children read less frequently compared to any previous generation and enjoy reading less than children did in the past. Some of the major reasons for this would be technological advancements and the availability of more attractive and less-costly substitute forms of entertainment such as video games, social media and movies which has resulted in children drifting towards these modern virtual forms of entertainment. This is a global social problem and is relevant to a developing country like Sri Lanka as well. Furthermore, it was also found that if an immediate solution is not found for this problem it could lead to many detrimental effects on the educational growth and development of future generations. The project aims to address these problems faced by children in Sri Lanka and to provide a solution which would motivate their reading habits. To achieve this, the strategies and interventions taken to motivate children’s reading habits and, the existing systems were thoroughly studied to identify the prevailing gaps in these systems. Furthermore, these findings were confirmed by gathering requirements from parents who have children from 5-15 years, teachers and story book authors. This served as the basis to design and develop the ‘ReadMore’ solution which is an interactive digital story book library for children. This application would help motivate the reading habits of children by making reading an interesting and interactive activity for them."