Monday 30 November 2009

Changes Based on Comments

Thanks very much to everyone who commented, and to all groups for putting up their learning objects for us to take a look at. Based on the comments and our own thoughts, here are the things that we are going to attempt to change:

1. Include more labels to let the learners know what the buttons do before they press them. I'd also like to include mouseover suggestions.
2. Label some of the key features: subductive plate, etc.
3. Finish adding a links section.
4. Improve the maps with the addition of the amount that the sea level is rising.
5. Maybe add some sound effects/voiceover.
6. Slow down the animation- we can experiment with dropping the framerate.

Anything I've missed?

PS: if anyone is interested in trying out Google Wave and hasn't got an invite, let me know.

Thursday 26 November 2009

Latest draft, comments please!

This is the latest draft of our project.
Here's the movie, if you just want to look at it: movie
And here's the source code if you want to see how it works/"remix" anything: source

Thursday 19 November 2009

New Draft

If anyone is following along, here's the latest draft, it now has working menus, but the content is still just placeholders.

Source

Movie

Cognitive Theory

* Multimedia principle – the learning object should integrate visual and verbal information, not verbal alone.

Our project has some text in it. The user can choose to view this text at the same time as watching the animation. Maybe we could offer tighter integration with the text and the specific things that are happening in the animation.


* Split-attention principle – words and pictures should be physically and temporally integrated.

The words and the pictures in our project are quite closely integrated. We have the text in a small window which is placed in the animation itself. Maybe we can make the text change to highlight specific events in the animation.


* Redundancy principle – the same information should not be presented in more than one format.

The text and pictures we have are not saying the same things.


* Modality principle – words should be spoken rather than written (in conversational rather than formal style, using a standard-accented human voice).

We don't have any spoken parts in our presentation. it might be a good idea to make a voiceover to explain what is happening in the animation. This might make the presentation seem more friendly.


* Segmenting principle – multimedia messages should be presented in student-paced segments.

Our project is focused on a specific thing. There is not enough content for us to have to split it into several segments. The students can control how fast the material is presented, and can choose to watch the animations as many times as they want.


* Pre-training principle – names and characteristics of main concepts should be familiar to students.

It's hard to have a pretraining idea built in to the presentation itself. maybe when the learning object is actually presented the teacher would have to add a lot of scaffolding. i'm not sure if it is a good idea to have an introduction in which the key terms are introduced.


* Coherence – extraneous material should be excluded.

I don't think we have anything extraneous.


* Signaling – cues should be used to highlight the organization of the essential material.

We have arrows, and the different aspects of the user interface are colour-coded to allow the student to simply identify what information is being presented at each stage.

Friday 13 November 2009

Droplets, continued...

Here's an awesome video of water drops falling, if you're interested!

Thursday 12 November 2009

New Draft

Here's our latest draft: download.
and movie: here

Tuesday 3 November 2009

tsunami draft

I think I have most of the coding infrastructure in place now, so we just need some animations. Talk about it on thursday, in the meantime here's the movie: movie
and here's the source if you want to take a look: source