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.