A*Star Education is delighted to announce the facility for MasterClass to create apps for iOS or for Android.

MasterClass is a content creation and authoring tool for web applications and a platform for interactive content. The capability of producing apps directly from the web application reduces app development time from man-months to hours. For approximately the same effort as producing a PowerPoint presentation, publishers can create an online, interactive tutorial and a high-quality, very professional app for the iPad, with full interactivity and all of the normal features and functionality you would expect - without requiring any programming effort.

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A*Star Education has just released the first in a series of Kindle books for GCSE Mathematics revision. These revision guides have been purposely designed as eBooks, particularly for reading on colour eReaders like the Kindle Fire, as well as the Kindle reading apps for tablets, smartphones and computers.

The eBooks are illustrated in full colour throughout, with the formatting designed to help readers target their particular grade, with colour-coded levels for examples and practice questions.

Grade checklists are provided to make sure readers cover all the relevant topics to achieve their target grade and the Test yourself sections appearing at the end of a chapter enable checking of progress, with links to fully-worked solutions for each problem.

A helpful glossary of terms and key words is also included in each guide.

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The first books to be released are the volumes for GCSE Foundation Maths, with GCSE Higher Maths to follow. Course textbooks and revision guides for IGCSE maths are planned for release later in 2012.

The first volume, Maths Matters GCSE Foundation Revision Guide for Algebra (ISBN 978-1-908-907-00-4) is available now from the Kindle Store.

Visit our eBooks page for more details.

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I am extremely pleased to be able to say that we successfully launched our new authoring tool for online, interactive eLearning content on 1 September to commercial users and it meets or exceeds all of the goals that we set for it in 2007.

Most educational software in use today, with claims to be interactive, is written in Adobe Flash and was developed some time ago. More precisely, it is written in Flash ActionScript 2 which is an early Adobe product that is no longer being developed; Adobe having replaced it with a brand new version of Flash, ActionScript 3, late in 2007. And it is important to understand the gulf in capabilities between these two different versions of Flash to appreciate the developments that led us to create MasterClass.

A*Star Education was formed to create really outstanding resources for teachers, particularly for teaching mathematics, where our objective was to offer all of the tools a teacher would want to teach maths in a secondary school.

The content would have to be completely interactive, allowing the user to influence the outcome of a problem, not just watch an animation.

Unlike any other provider, our goal was to allow users of our software to have total control of the content.

Teachers would be able to edit all of the material in the lessons and create their own, without limit. Tables and graphs would be created from a data file that the user created. They would be able to set any type of question (not just multiple-choice or drag-and-drop) for homework assignments or tests and the assessments would have to be marked automatically, feeding results to any VLE, give instant feedback to students and show them solutions that would gain full marks for any questions they got wrong, whilst capturing all of their working so teachers could assess their degree of understanding.

In addition, the software would have to be easy to use. Drawing graphs (straight-line, quadratic, cubic) would be done by dragging your finger across an interactive whiteboard, moving and transforming. Creating animated content would have to be accomplished quickly and easily by users with no programming knowledge. Users would not have to source images but would pick high quality graphics from a database. Creating new assessments should be so simple that it would not require any new SCORM objects to be loaded to a VLE - a process that users find difficult and time consuming.

Students would be able to personalise and save all of their revision notes and they would have to be able to access it anywhere. From a performance perspective, content would have to load rapidly and require only moderate processing power.

Back in 2007, there was no development tool which would give us these capabilities (other than MasterClass, there still isn't) and we set out to create our own. The language we chose was Flash ActionScript 3. This allowed us to interface to powerful 3-D engines and to use programming to manipulate three-dimensional arrays for real time movement (rather than a time line) and rotation of objects. Crucially, it also allowed development of the very large-scale application we needed (in a way that neither ActionScript 2 nor HTML5 can).

MasterClass uses specialist players for tutorial content and assessment. Images and text form virtual "slides" through links in the database. The ability to use vector images with just a single instance in the database, keeps data sizes low and means that content loads extremely rapidly. User profiles govern what they can access, edit, change and create - and share with other users. The tools for drawing, layout and animation are extremely precise and users who take moderate care can create very professional content.

Adobe will release their Stage 3D software in April 2012, with the capability of incorporating video game-quality graphics into applications, whilst making use of onboard graphics processors to give a significant improvement in performance. With MasterClass, integrating Adobe Stage 3D is easy because the MasterClass framework and the content are separate.

MasterClass runs on any Flash-enabled device and performs well on Android tablets such as the Asus Transformer, and mobile phones. Particular attention has been paid to performance on tablets and usability on devices without keyboards, where keyboard input is required. Tablet users accessing MasterClass content can lock in to "tablet mode" to improve response times and use the onboard tools to input text rather than have the pop-up keyboard obscure the content. MasterClass runs on Android 2.2 and higher and Flash Player 10 and above.

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We are delighted to announce the release of Maths Matters Online and believe it to be the best resource available for teaching mathematics, whether in class or over the web.

The capabilities of Maths Matters provide truly powerful and editable teaching resources; lessons with exceptional interactivity; assessments where you can see and record all the working; a complete set of interactive tools which turn any device into an interactive whiteboard.

Teachers can edit any of the 420 lessons and 3000 questions, and create their own. Access to the 8000+ custom images allows lessons and assessments to be lavishly illustrated.

To find out more, visit Maths Matters Online.

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