A Mobile Application for Preparing the Driving Tests in Hong Kong

School of Science and Technology 科技學院
Computing Programmes 電腦學系

A Mobile Application for Preparing the Driving Tests in Hong Kong

NG Sze Wai Judy


Programme	Bachelor of Science with Honours in Computing
Supervisor	Dr. Vanessa Ng
Areas	Innovative Mobile Applications
Year of Completion	2014

Objectives

The project aims to develop an educational mobile application on the Android platform for preparing both the driving theory test and road test in Hong Kong. This application will give car learners some basic concepts of driving and let them to practice and revise with their mobile devices. It provides guidebooks, mock tests, animations and virtual driving games to help users, especially young private automatic car learners who are going to take the driving tests, to do revision and pass the driving tests in Hong Kong easily.

The project has defined a number of sub-objectives as follows:

Design and develop a driving theory handbook sorted by topics
Design and develop practices and mock tests for the driving theory test
Design and develop driving guidebook and driving step test
Design and develop animations and virtual driving tests for the road driving test
Evaluate the effectiveness of the new application

Background and Methodology

In this project, an Android educational application for car learners to prepare driving tests in Hong Kong is suggested to be developed. This may be related to the M-learning of E-learning, contextual learning and some background of the driving tests and car driving lessons in Hong Kong. Also, some existing solutions are reviewed to show the need for a new solution. There will be two main sections in the application which are theory test and road test where the overview is shown below:

There is the car used in the virtual road test that keeps rotating on the starting page and the main menu of the application will be entered after clicking the red sport car on the starting page. There are theory test part, road test part and the about us showing the information and background of this application. There is background music on this page which can be turned off by clicking the button on the left bottom corner. In this application, users can go back to the previous page by clicking the back button or click the home button with red house on the top right corner in the menu action bar to go back to the main menu. The main menu is shown below:

There are exercises for the theory test sorted by topics without time limit. Questions on the topic selected will be displayed in a slider randomly. There are three options in each multiple choice question and the options will also be randomly generated. After answering a question by clicking the radio button of the answer and the “Next” button on the right hand side, the result will immediately be Users may do the practices of the same topic repeatedly and they can stop at any point by closing the slider by clicking “Close” button at the bottom or swiping the slider away. Details are shown below:

After studying the driving skills, virtual driving tests can be taken. The correct driving steps and response to the special situation are tested. There are three virtual driving tests and the menu page with them which are the L-shape parking test, S-shape parking test and on-road test.

In the on-road test, there are instructions and warning given in form of both voice and text. This makes the test more realistic like having driving lessons or tests in real car with an instructor. The way to control the car is the same as the parking tests mentioned. During the test, users have to follow the instruction to drive and complete the test such as the direction of roads. There are scenarios to test users' response where a car is suddenly stopped. If serious mistake is made like car crash, the test will be stopped immediately as that is impossible to happen in the real test.

A final mark sheet is shown after finishing the test where the marking scheme will be similar to the real one. The mark sheet shows the numbers of different mistakes have been made during the whole test and the result of passing the test or not where users will pass if there is no big mistake or there are no more than three minor mistakes.

Evaluation

There are three kinds of evaluation data including the results of tests in the application done by the participants, data from questionnaires and comments from interview. The overall results tend to be positive but there is still room for improvement.

90% and 100% of the participants in (Group A) get a better result in Theory Mock Test and the Virtual on-road Test respectively after revision with the application for five days.

The average score of the ability on helping in preparing driving test of this application is 4.2 out of 5 (84/100).

The average overall score of the application is 4 out of 5 (80/100).

The 46 shows that 100%, 50% and 70 % of participants agree that the application help in preparing written test, competence test (Part B) and on-road (Part C) test in Hong Kong respectively.

100% of participants agree that the application helps in preparing the driving tests in Hong Kong and gives basic driving concepts.

100%, 75% and 80% of participants believe that the attractiveness of this application is free of charge, multi-purpose (helps in preparing all parts of driving tests) and the multimedia (helps in memorizing) respectively.

The details are shown below:

The mobile application helps in preparing both the driving theory test and road test in Hong Kong and gives basic driving concepts to learners. Users are quite satisfied with the application with score of 4 out of 5 in average. This application provides enough materials for car learners to do revision themselves and they may pass the driving tests in Hong Kong easily with better result. The virtual road tests provide a contextual learning which may help learners to learn driving effectively in an interesting way. It is believed that the multimedia in the application can help learners to have long term memory which is in favor of preparing driving tests.

Conclusion and Future Development

In this project, an Android educational application for car learners to prepare driving tests in Hong Kong is developed. The aims and objectives are achieved and satisfied.

The following lists the key successes:

Slider layout was used in the theory practice and handbook which greatly reduces the number of activity used and thus the memory usage because of the decrease of the activities in the stack. It also helps with the file size due to the reduction of coding. The design will be optimizes and the application can be more user-friendly.
In order to have a similar format of the theory written test, there are quite a lot of functions in theory mock test including setting a timer, answers modification or checking and generation of questions and answer choices randomly. They are nicely implemented into one activity without crushing after fixing the bugs.
This application is designed to use Eclipse to write the theory part and Unity for the animations and games. The integration of them is so troublesome that a week has been spent to deal with it but luckily they are finally combined by importing the Unity game scenes into the Eclipse project.

The following lists the limitation of the solutions:

The road test part will only be available for the learners who want to learn driving a car with an automatic transmission due to the leak of driving techniques of the manual one. However, the basic driving skills and theories are still useful to all private car learner drivers except the motorbike learners.
The angle of car wheel rotation and the steering wheel may not be as realistic as the real car due to the physical properties setting in Unity. The physical value in the Unity world is slightly different from the real world so it is difficult to set those physical properties.
The side rear mirrors cannot be shown together in the scene without clicking the button because the number of cameras shown in one scene is limited. Therefore, only the driver sight and the main rear mirror can be shown at the same time in a scene.