Oriolus Lernprogramme

The German company Oriolus Lernprogramme GmbH has been developing learning programs for use in educational institutions and for learning at home since 1994. Several appearances at the book fair and other education fairs led to much praise and a total of twelve Comenius awards.

The available learning packages start in preschool, go through elementary school, and reach even to high school. The subject areas are mathematics, German, English, French, and general studies.

Challenges

Learning programs are not learning games!
Successful learning programs have an element of fun but are designed for learning, not gaming.

Learning programs without unneeded showiness!
The structure and the visual or acoustic use should concentrate on the learning content and not on many flashy or colorful animations.

Learning programs should be fun!
Success in learning is important, but reward systems that divert attention from learning should be explicitly avoided.

Learning programs must be flexible!
The programs should be identical on as many devices and modern platforms as possible.

Learning programs cannot replace teachers!
Students, teachers, and parents must be equally integrated into the system.

Learning programs must be inexpensive and up to date!
The balancing act of offering an inexpensive solution and providing good technical and content support must be achieved.

Since the academic structure is inconsistently regulated by the different sovereign rights of the states, the counties, and even the individual schools, it is not easy to cover all these levels.

Solutions

Starting in 1996 it was decided to develop the learning program in Delphi—of course, at first only on Windows. The core is the viewer, a window that is fed with the respective learning content.

By using FireMonkey technology in Delphi, it was then possible to create a perfect solution for use on different platforms. In particular, the mobile solutions on the iPad or under Android stand out here, as they are increasingly used in the school sector.

Already, over 8,000 schools are among the customers of Oriolus and have brought much praise in recent years. This total number of exercise pages has already grown to over 50,000 and is constantly being expanded.

Thousands of lovingly designed illustrations in combination with stable and flexible software make the learning program a complete system with a lot of future potential.

Delphi is just a great platform. I love this programming language! The cross-platform development possible with the release of FireMonkey was a huge gift for us! After many years of Windows programming, to see the app running on iOS, Android and macOS for the first time were absolute highlights! Fortunately, we were able to reuse almost all of the old code, with a manageable number of platform-specific sections. A thousand thanks to Embarcadero for this opportunity, without which we would not have been able to develop so much in the decade!

Joachim Kleinlein, Managing Director and Lead Developer at Oriolus

Results

The Oriolus learning programs are an excellent example of how applications grow over the years and are efficiently adapted to new platforms. Delphi and FireMonkey provides an extremely high level of investment security that simply works.

The small team around the two managing directors, Rosi Bock and Joachim Kleinlein, put the entire focus on the application, the content, and its pedagogical preparation or presentation. The company deliberately does all this without any unnecessary bells and whistles or extensive online services in order to keep the learning programs affordable and up to date. With many beautiful pictures, clear tasks, and the simple approach to learning, practicing, and testing, the application more than fulfills its mission.

The Oriolus learning programs developed in Delphi are already successfully in use in over 8000 schools. Without advertising and without online constraints.

Rosi Bock, Managing Director and Author Oriolus Lernprogramme