An educational CD-ROM on classical Chinese literature

Literature represents the main culture of a race or country. China has a long history of more than 4000 years and her classical literature has been fascinating and attracting people who are interested in arts around the world. We have developed six CD-ROMs that include 180 chapters on Chinese literature, comprising poems, songs, articles and essays, that serve as supplementary learning materials for primary and secondary students. The paper presents the distinctive features of this multimedia package and also the technical procedures in developing the programs and databases. A high level programming language, Delphi (i.e. object oriented Pascal language), is employed instead of using commercially available multimedia production packages such as Action!, Director and ToolBook etc., thus offering extremely high flexibility and creativity. Thanks to the features built in Delphi, the production effort is just comparable with those packages. Techniques in sound compression, image compression and speech recognition are adopted to produce this educational package.