Though we are the largest open-source game engine in the world, we don’t just work on games. Cocos has been empowering the education field for several years in China and abroad. This month, Cocos launched a new software product that allows for interactive courseware education, Cocos ICE. This creation tool is built for the education industry and helps teachers quickly get started making high-quality, lightweight interactive courseware without the need to understand coding.

The process of creating a new education app with beautiful scenes and highly interactive teaching courseware, even for a mature technology company, needs dozens of hours of work by product managers, programmers, art, audio, video, and other departments to complete a functional and quality app.

An education company also needs to increase communication costs with teachers creating these lessons and discuss how to construct abstract and complex teaching content, how it is presented, visualize difficult points of knowledge, and use exquisite animation to teach and gamify interaction. The communication cost between R&D and non-R&D personnel accounts for almost 80% of the time for complete courseware production.

Therefore, based on the powerful underlying technology of our engine, we have created an interactive courseware production tool that allows teachers to use and quickly produce exquisite courseware easily. It can be used to develop highly interactive, high rendering performance, and lightweight teaching content. It also provides free access to existing team workflows and third-party resource/material management libraries to shorten workflow and improve courseware quality and productivity.

Integrated artificial intelligence technology and the ability to use 2D and 3D assets help create a powerfully immersive experience and interactive courseware that integrates with teaching scenarios. With the help of Cocos ICE, the original courseware that would take hundreds of hours to produce, test, and optimize, can be built by one teacher that only needs to spend half an hour to create courseware, thereby enhancing the attractiveness of the course, improve the concentration of students, and speed up the learning of the students.

Easy to use, visual editing, collaborative work

The interactive courseware editor is a combination of two environments based on Cocos Creator. R&D and teachers can freely switch the interface between the environments. R&D and art can use the backend environment to make materials directly and import them into the resource library, and teachers can directly select courseware interface for assembly.

Teachers only need to know the logic behind the backend creation like multiple-choice questions, memory tests, drag-and-drop questions, and fill-in-the-blank questions commonly used in interactive education to add them into their course. Teachers can quickly fill in their course with images, text, animations, videos, and sound effects, using simple operations such as drag and drop and selection to preview their presentation in real-time.

After the teacher saves it and uploads it, the programmer only needs to extract the courseware completed by the teacher from the courseware library and upload it to the app.

Interactive video editing mode

In addition to interactive gamified learning courseware, the combination of video and animation that add to the interaction is popular in education courses. The editor provides a unique interactive video editing mode. Teachers can simply drag the video and interactive game templates into the timeline. After editing some settings, teachers can produce high-quality interactive video courseware.

In addition to interactive games, teachers can also set up different branches. Students can choose different options to jump to different videos, just like playing games with narrative choices, so that students can have a richer and more exciting learning experience.

Cross-platform, multi-end interaction, and efficient workflow

Cocos ICE is based on Cocos's underlying technology and deeply supports major mainstream platforms. Courseware can be quickly published to the Web, iOS, Android, Windows, Mac, and other platforms, allowing you to maximize the courseware’s visibility and probability of success. The engine runtime developed by pure JavaScript provides great performance on HTML5 sites in a small package. And on other native platforms, C++ is used to implement the underlying framework to provide higher operating efficiency.

Ensuring a better future in education

In this process of paying more and more attention to the competitiveness of new technology, about 95% of online education companies in China chose Cocos as their engine for developing interactive educational content.

As a world-renowned engine company that has been honed by ten years of experience and adhering to the mission of "improving the efficiency of the technology-driven digital content industry,” we’ve deepened our work to improve education by creating software that supports the demands on educational content worldwide.

We are launching tools like Cocos ICE to improve the environment of the online education industry, to provide a complete AAA interactive courseware software that makes content production of online education better, more efficient, more compatible, and excite the lives of kids and adults wanting to learn.