Microsoft is developing a new suite of tools that will allow developers and publishers of educational software, as well as educators themselves, to create their own instructional programs easily and intuitively, the company says. Users would control these programs on their computer screens, using a media player that Microsoft expects will ship with all Windows-based computers in the near future. The entire software environment is code-named "Grava."

The Grava development tools, which Microsoft previewed at the British Education and Training Technology Conference in mid-January, are meant to stand alone as separate applications. A Grava SDK (Software Developer Kit) tool is designed for publishers and developers of educational software, while a different authoring tool will give those with less programming experience--such as many educators--the ability to create their own media-rich content to be viewed with the Grava player, Microsoft says.

By introducing these new tools, Microsoft hopes to reduce the time and money spent creating educational software for schools. Because developers won't need high-level programming expertise to create Grava-based programs, the tools could eliminate the common software development cycle in which a subject-matter expert creates content, then hands it off to a programming team to write code, which then returns it for more changes, and so on.

Using Grava, "developers can create very rich [educational materials] ... to make learning much more fun and engaging," says Ravi Soin, product unit manager for Microsoft's Education Products Group.

With the Grava player, users reportedly will be able to customize the experiments, surveys, or tests they are running. If a developer were to create a program demonstrating a specific law of physics, for example, he or she could set the features to be customized by educators. Teachers then would have the ability to tailor the program to their own experiments.

As an incentive for software developers and publishers to begin using Grava to create programs, Microsoft has included the software needed to play Grava, the .Net 3.0 Framework, in its newly released Windows Vista operating system. Windows XP users are able to download .Net 3.0 through Microsoft's web site, said Kapil Thombare, product manager for the company's ducation Products Group.

In addition to the developers' and publishers' tools, Grava provides educators with an authoring tool that lets them create projects to be used on their own computers, or published online as web applications.

"It's going to be easy for educators to work with the tool," says Thombare. "Our plan is to have a certain amount of information up front. Educators can use templates that would make it much easier to come up with the end result they are expecting to achieve."

This ease of use is something many believe could be Grava's greatest attribute.