The final report on the learning object - "Spring Garden"

MITE 6323 Interactive Representations of Information and Knowledge

How to use the learning object of “Spring Garden”

The following is the lesson plan for the mentioned learning object:
1. Target audience: Kindergarten to Primary two school age children
2. Goal: To enhance literacy skills in young children.
3. Objectives: to support young children in their reading
comprehension and fluency; to enhance their oral reading skill;
and to be interested in reading interactive representative
learning objects.
4. Procedures:
a) Children are given reading instruction in the classroom setting;
b) Children are supported by their parents as teachers in the home
setting by interacting with the learning object, the Spring Garden.
c) The child plays with the learning object with an adult’s company,
learning both the oral and written forms of the nursery rhyme
at his pace and interest.

My Role in the Production
1. Propose the idea and the framework for the learning object
including selecting the nursery rhyme as the learning material
and designing teaching content;
2. Create the storyboard with the ppt application including searching
for all the pictures involved in the storyboard;
3. Produce the first draft of the Flash version by putting all the slides
involved into one single representation and applying the interactive
techniques like the Map exercise.
4. Work together to produce the final product and apply a new
approach as the final.
In summary, I contribute mainly to the teaching content part and
partly to the technicals.

The followings are the swf and fla files:
http://iln.cite.hku.hk/com/1374/users/2003989283/spring-tree-77.swf
http://iln.cite.hku.hk/com/1374/users/2003989283/spring-tree-77.fla

The reflectons on the production are also the reflections on producting the phototype.

Revised Version on the final prototype

We would like the product to be more original. Here is the revised version on the Spring Tree. Comments are welcome!

Reflection - The Production of the Prototype

After we have made the storyboard, I need to learn necessary techniques to make the storyboard become a real thing, the Flash learning object. I first identified the techniques involved in the Map exercise and the Bouncing Ball exercise would be what I need to master for the prototype production.

There are basic Flash skills embedded in the production of interactive presentation from those Flash tutorials. Both the movie type and printed type of tutorials are good for the self-study purpose. I started with the movie ones because they looked like easy to learn. Later, when I got more familiar with such teaching aids, I felt confident to learn more techniques from reading tutorial books. The more complicated Flash samples can be better explained from the print format. Unlike the movie tutorial, the print format one allows me to revisit each part of a tutorial sample right away.

I enjoy working together with my partner, Qingchun. She knows very well about computer. I prepared myself by viewing the movie tutorials and practicing the exercises before we worked on our project together. It is good to have one person (Qingchun) concentrating on the operation and the other (myself) on checking operation errors.

Qingchun was well prepared for the discussion meeting with a tutorial book as our teacher. She showed her proficiency in computer skills. I learnt by observing how she operated the keys of the computer keyboard. It was a good learning lesson. I have learnt those details that both the movie and print tutorials are unable to show.

I reread those comments given by classmates for our prototype and I understand more about it from the audience’s perspective. For example, it is better to show the sequence of those sentences. Even though that is an obvious component of the learning content, I am not conscious about that. Also, some other areas for improvement such as from where to begin the saying of the rhyme, too many hot spot buttons and the fading words should be taken into consideration.

However, we have a brand new version of the learning material. What we are going to do with these two versions is another concern. Should we discard one? Or, combine them together into a more complicated version? Do we have time and skills to handle that? Let’s gather some ideas and then decide what to do next.

Prototype: Spring Tree (Brand New Version)

This version is different from the version we, Quingchun and I , posted a week ago. The previous one I used the technique the Map exercise adopted while this one is a brand new version for the same content.

For the same teaching content, Quingchun has different ideas from mine and that is good because young children could have their learning reforced by different approaches of the same content. As we know that young children learn through repitition. They focus on different area of the learning every time they approach a new presentation of the topic. The new version of the prototype is Spring Tree. Please click on it and enjoy a brand new version.

Prototype - "Spring Garden -The Nursery Rhyme"

Target audience: Kindergarten children

Goal: To enhance literacy skills in young children

Objectives: To support young children in their reading comprehension and fluency;
To enhance their oral reading skill; and
To be interested in reading interactive pictural learning objects.

Procedures: 1. Children are given reading instruction in the classroom setting ;
2. Children are supported by their parents as teachers in the home setting by
interacting with the learning object, the Spring Garden.
3. The child works on their own to interact with the learning object by himself,
learning the saying of the nurse phyme on his pace and at his own interest.

This is the Spring Garden. Comments are welcome.

Problem with the posting of the Flash prototype

I have problem to upload the Flash prototype of the module project onto my Blog. Normally I can open the file on the ILN site, however, the Flash file does not open there.

There are three files created after I have finished and viewed the Flash Movie, one with the tag of fla which is the working file, the other one with html which contains nothing, and the third one with swf which is used to play the presentation. Could anybody tell me what is that html?

Could anyone tell me what I can do to upload the swf file onto the Blog? Thanks!

My reflection - the learning process on the Map exercise

The Map presentation seems like simple and easy to pick up the Flash techniques involved. However, it is not the case. I have spent night after night working on making a copy just exactly the same as the sample even the ways and wordings of it.

Going through the problem solving process on the Map exercise, I have learnt the major functions of Flash particularly the ActionScript function. My Flash application does not have the dialogue box appearing after I select the “tellTarget” command. I have no way to become a copy machine and go through the whole process by following the actions demonstrated in the tutorial of the Map exercise.

I try to find short cut to solve the problem like going back to HKU computer lab and downloading the Flash MX version, the one is used for the Map tutorial. However, the Wizard and the dialogue box do not come out. In order to solve the basic problem, I must go back to the very basic, knowing what the ActionScript is and learning how to use it to help me get my jobs done.

My learning partner gave me some websites for learning Flash. I visited these websites and I found many useful resources. There are many tutorials and examples for beginning and advanced learners to view and learn. (You might want to visit the following website if you find Chinese version is better for you to understand the concepts, however, you need to understand Putonghua.)

http://tech.china.com/zh_cn/netschool/homepage/flash/

There is a tutorial about the core concepts on writing action scripts. That one really helps me. Now I can understand the basic Flash language. With this understanding, I am able to do problem solving during the Flash editing process. Whenever your Flash presentation does not work out as you expect, you need to find out how to solve the problem. It is so frustrated if you don’t have a direction where you are going. But, with the understanding of the Flash language, you know the diagnosis you make will help you solve the problem.

Working on the Flash application, the user needs to be very, very careful on every action. The Flash application does not understand you and does not work for you if you make a very insignificant error. Even though it always tells you what error occurs in which level, which line and which frame in a very exact way, for some occasions, no error is given and you will be in trouble.