Sanaa Ghanem's program, Learn Arabic, was designed for "educating adult foreigners in the Arabic language," and is a program that would represent the Arabic language and culture accurately, she said.

Ghanem received the Byte magazine award for her program at the Gitex Fair in Dubai. The four-part program was co-designed by Ghanem and Nabil Ali, vice president of Sakhr software.

Learn Arabic is the first program to cater to the global needs of non-Arab learners as it allows its users to cover all parts of the language. It includes lessons that are configured according to user's preferences, four-language explanations - English, French, Turkish and Malaysian - and a song with authentic Middle Eastern music.

The first part of the program is divided into lessons and the second part has general information about the Arab culture - "Appreciate Arabic," - in the second, Ghanem said.

For those interested in Islam, the third part is about the Koran and the last is a typing tutor.

Designing the program itself involved learning how to evaluate software programs, a comparative study on all the available programs and design and implementation, Ghanem said.

The process of developing the idea included contacting software companies for support, she said.

She chose SAKHR because "it's the leader in Arabic language research and natural language processing and is the largest software company in the Middle East."

A team of programmers helped her but she was the information collector, researcher and supervisor.

Ghanem tried in her approach to transform a manually working teacher into a software designer that uses programs in teaching.

According to Ghanem, teaching Arabic as a foreign language is a privilege and a disadvantage at the same time. It's unfortunate for the lack of software programs for teaching Arabic, but that offers the teachers a chance to design their own.

"This is the direction that lot's of teachers are concentrating on as it is the future."

Ghanem's teaching capabilities and creativity were the basis of her design. She also has programming and multimedia skills.

Ghanem received her B.A. from AUC in economics with a minor in business administration in 1982. She earned her Master's degree also from AUC in Teaching Arabic as a Foreign Language, 1989. Besides, she received a computer professional certificate from the center of adult continuing education in 1997. She also has received intensive training in computer programming and was the first to introduce teaching Arabic as a foreign language at the university of Abidjan.

According to Ghanem, anyone interested in helping in the process of debugging and becoming a beta tester is welcome to contact Ghanem on her E-mail account which is: sanaa@uns2.auc.eun.eg