Warner College of Natural Resources PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) Initiative 

Students attending Pingree learn how to identify the flora and fauna of the area. To facilitate the learning process, we developed an application called eFlashcards. eFlashcards, very simply put, is an electronic version of 3 by 5 index cards which students use to quiz themselves with. The application displays a photo randomly picked from the guide which students have to identify. Students have the option of clicking on a "Reveal" button which displays the answer or clicking on "Next" which displays another photo randomly drawn from the guide.

eFlashcards was developed using flash. Flash player was installed on the Pocket PC and the information from the fieldguide was stored in XML files. The flash application reads information from the XML files before generating the flashcard. A set of flashcards was generated for each of the guides. In addition to photos, the bird eFlashcards contained bird calls allowing students to test their bird call identification skills as well.

The eFlashcards were made available to students attending the second session of Pingree. They were well-received amongst the students with 75% of students agreeing that it was a useful study tool.

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