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Communicating science - Multimedia and all that |
This article first appeared in Questions magazine Volume 7, Issue 1, Sept/Oct 1994 and is one of a series of five.
In the previous articles in
this series I have mainly looked at applications of IT which support or enhance
practical science activities. This article focuses on multimedia presentations,
which children have produced themselves, to communicate their knowledge, ideas
and experiences in science.
This represents a new literacy in which children consider, not only what they want to say, but also how it is to be presented and how pieces of information link together so that the reader can best share their understanding. At the same time it is a familiar literacy in that today's children are overwhelmed by such information through the electronic media, much of it in a highly visual form, and they have to develop the skills to make sense of it. Multimedia authoring represents both sides of this communication process and may well be an essential future skill. But, to begin with let's look at what is happening now.
In the IT area of the primary classroom a couple of children are working at a computer. On screen is a coloured picture which is easily recognised as a representation of the Solar System. Part of the Sun is shown, bright yellow, in one corner and the planets are shown in order of closeness to the Sun; the smaller planets such as the Earth, Mercury and Neptune dominated by the looming presence of Jupiter and Saturn. As one child moves the mouse pointer over the screen it comes to rest over Saturn and she presses the mouse button.
The screen changes and there is a
photograph of Saturn taken by the Voyager probe accompanied by text giving
information about the planet. In one corner of the screen is a much smaller
version of the first screen and, by moving the mouse pointer over this and
clicking the button, the children are able to go back to the Solar System
diagram and choose another planet, or the Sun itself, to get further
information.
If you were to say, "That sounds very useful. Where can I get hold of the software?" I'm afraid you'd be disappointed. The Solar System isn't for sale; but I dare say that those children might let you have a copy if you asked them nicely - since they are the authors. They designed the framework of the program and drew the Solar System screen. Other children in the class researched the information about the planets and wrote a couple of paragraphs about each one. Their teacher helped by contacting the local IT centre who provided the planet images for the children to use in their program. They then used a multimedia authoring package to put the whole thing together as a presentation as part of a display centred around the earth in space.
Multimedia is a term which may be new to you; or you may have heard and not completely understood. In simple terms it means using a computer to bring together a range of media; text, photographs and diagrams, sounds and moving images, to communicate ideas or information. You are probably familiar with creating text on a computer and may have used a drawing or painting package to produce diagrams and pictures. If you have seen a scanner in action, you will know that it is relatively easy to copy a photograph as a screen image. However you may not be aware that, with the right equipment, you can also record sounds and moving images onto a computer and play them back as you would on a tape recorder or VCR.
This sounds like fairly advanced stuff but, in fact, it is now almost the norm in software production and becoming increasingly common in schools. This beginning to happen because today's computers are fast enough and have a large enough memory capacity to cope with very large sound and image files and authoring software is becoming much easier to use. Text, images and sound files are all stored digitally and authoring software is used to determine where and when information is presented and how individual screens are linked together. Authoring software ranges in complexity from the very simple, which can be easily handled by primary children, through to advanced packages used by professionals to create sophisticated multimedia presentations.
Whatever their level of sophistication, multimedia authoring packages perform basically the same function. A multimedia presentation can be thought of as a number of screens of information - think of a stack of cards containing words pictures and, sometimes, sounds as well. In the Solar System example there are just ten screens whereas a professional package may have many hundreds. The author decides how each screen will look - what colour the text will be, the background colour or pattern, where the text and/or images will be placed and how the user will move from one screen to another. This navigation is usually achieved by moving a mouse pointer over an area of the screen and clicking a mouse button. The 'hot' area may be of any size but is typically a small 'button'.
'Minstead', another example of a multimedia presentation, from year 5 pupils at a middle school in Hampshire, will serve to show how the authoring process works. The presentation came out of a week-long residential visit to Minstead Study Centre in the New Forest. During the week the pupils collected the information they would need to produce the presentation.
They were well resourced with a modern computer, a scanner to transfer drawings and photographs to the screen and an Ion camera - a still camera which saves its images to a disc in digital format so that they can be directly transferred to the computer. By the end of the week, in addition to the plethora of notes and drawings one would expect after a week's visit, they had taken dozens of computer images of places they had been and things they had seen as a basis for further work on the project back at school.
The illustrations show a screen from one part of the Minstead presentation on animal life; a first a 'menu' screen links to other information screens about some of the creatures children encountered.
Choices are made by placing the mouse pointer over the required picture and clicking the mouse button. Each screen was planned and put together by a pair of children who selected the images to be used and wrote the text based on their library research. The screen above, about hornets, illustrates many aspects of a multimedia presentation. The drawing of the hornet, in pencil and crayon, was scanned to provide the screen image and the word-processed text is presented in two sections which describe where they encountered the hornets and the information they have researched about the hornet's habits.
The 'buttons' in the bottom right hand corner allow the user to move to other parts of the presentation. 'Next' takes you to the next screen and 'Last' to the previous one. 'Contents' takes you back to the contents page where you can opt to look at screens describing the study centre, the village or the forest. There are also hidden 'buttons' over the words 'dormitory' and 'thorax' in the first text box. The children decided that these words might be unfamiliar to some users and so they recorded explanations of them - so if you place the mouse pointer anywhere on 'thorax' and click the mouse button you will hear a child say;
"the part of an insect which has legs and wings on it",
or select 'dormitory' to hear:
"a large sleeping room with lots of beds".
This illustrates an important feature of multimedia; the reader has control over how he or she approaches the information. Rather than moving through in a linear way, as you do with a book or video, you can choose the route which you take - whether, depending on you particular interest, you go back to the contents page and look at another aspect of the visit or go on to the next page about animals. This has implications for the authors of the presentation. The authoring software will allow them to design the screens, place text, images and sound, and decide where 'buttons' will be placed; but they have to decide what information to include and how the pages will link together. This requires them to think very carefully about who will be the audience for their presentation and affects the way they structure it so that the users can understand it and can see how to access the information they require. In doing so the authors will have to consider the complexity of the text, the clarity of images and where users will need further information.
Having read the previous paragraphs you may well be thinking that here is something you'd like to try in your classroom. If so, your next thought is likely to be that you couldn't possibly afford a scanner, an Ion camera or a sound digitiser. Certainly these resources represent a considerable investment and you would need to be convinced of their worth before committing hard-pressed funds. However the good news is that you don't need them to get started. You will already have a word-processor to produce text and you should have a drawing or painting program to create images. If you require more sophisticated images there are a number of ways to do this. Try your local IT support service; they should have the facility to scan pictures and photographs and provide you the images on disc. You can also buy collections of 'clip-art' - ready drawn sets of pictures to support particular themes, e.g. dinosaurs or mammals; and there is a growing collection of freely usable images, such as those of the planets (from NASA) mentioned in the first example, available through specialist computer magazines or on electronic mail. You will also need an authoring package, of which there area range available including, for the Acorn Archimedes Magpie and Genesis; for the Apple Macintosh HyperStudio and Hypercard; and for IBM PC Compatibles MM-Box and Multimedia Toolbook.
NCET (now BECTa) produces a range of
resources to support teachers who wish to use IT in their science work.
Also available on-line is an
with notes for teachers, activity sheets for children and
reports from the classroom .
If you would like any information about NCET products contact :
The Information Officer
BECTa
Science Park,
Milburn Hill Road
Coventry CV4 7JJ
or telephone 01203 416994.
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Copyright ©1995 Links revised and updated by Sue Wentworth-Sheilds |  |