Today was quite productive as it seemed like all of the elements of action research were working together. Various children required assistance which then became teaching points to be shared with the whole class as they pertained to animation guidelines as follows:

1. Reduce the number of variables. (Mayer's coherence principle). This arose from the Grade 5 girl whose topic is "Sharps and flats". She was using notation software to generate the musical imagery and had given the various sharp and flat notes different rhythmic values. Reducing variables keeps the point of a lesson in focus.
2. Keep the background white unless you have a reason to change it. (Mayer's coherence principle). Although this principle is for extraneous words, pictures and sounds, a background colour or pattern can be just as distracting. Most children like having colourful backgrounds so I let this go at first but some of the patterns and textures that they wanted were reducing clarity.
3. Don't include the voice over text in the animation. (Mayer's redundancy principle). My Apostrophes animation doesn't adhere to this but in that case I used the morphing text to illustrate my points.

Only about 6 children managed to access their work today due to technical difficulties AGAIN! I got the other children to present their thoughts and progress within a time limit of 60 seconds followed by a short Q & A session. This seemed to salvage the afternoon rather well and I learnt the following:

The "Pizza fractions" girl decided to number her pizza slices. I recommended that she didn't do this as her imagery could resemble an actual pizza. I also suggested that our minds can cope with grouping pizza slices without numbering.

Another teaching point came about when watching the "Brakes" presentation. This boy said that "All brakes are made of metal". When I said that this is not always true using rubber bicycle brake pads as an example he said that "All wheels are metal". Once again I said that some wheels are made of other materials like plastic. This discussion raised the issue of using inclusive language and avoiding making statements that go beyond what is necessary.

I now bring my own two laptop computers to each session to increase the ratio of reliable technology. Only one of the school laptops logged on which was very frustrating. I refuse to allow such sessions to be completely wasted so I continue to discuss ideas with these children as they clarify their logic flow. From now on I will organise a hub and Ethernet cables which should help the log-in process.

We had parent / teacher interviews earlier in the week where I met with the parents of the "Evolution" animation child who had recently discontinued. He decided to persevere and after some discussion, changed his topic to "Plate tectonics".

The "Guitars" student is also realising that his topic might be too big unless he specialises in one aspect. This could end up being "Acoustics" or "Tuning".

The "Guitar" animation student has decided to make his topic "Alternate tunings". This is a good choice as the focus can be on how the tunings differ from standard tuning without any mention of the science of tuning which is much more complex.

The "Pizza fractions" animation girl was quite excited as she had worked on her animation at home and brought in her work on a USB drive. Last week I had helped her organise the layout from 1/12 through to 12/12ths. Her new animation had the pizza depicted with minimal cuts. i.e. thirds had three cuts instead of 12ths grouped into three lots of four slices. I suggested reverting to the actual cuts which would be evident in each fraction. She was upset that I wanted to change her hard work.

At this point I had to proceed carefully as I remembered that her understanding of fractions was incomplete. I knew this because in her prior knowledge video she said that "the biggest fraction is one". I counted the other children in the room and asked her "What is a third of 15?" She didn't know. I told her that it was 5 and then asked "What is a third of 3,000?" She didn't know this either.

We discussed how fractions can be very large like half the population of a country. She then understood why my suggestion for her animation was appropriate and was relieved to see that it could be implemented quite quickly.

Moving the slices out from the centre was hard to manipulate in PowerPoint and I didn't want her to lose momentum so we added dots beside each selected piece to show which slices we were referring to.

13th September

(A Monday instead of Thursday due to "Planning week".

There are two weeks of holidays at the end of this week.

I've started to notice that the girls are for forthcoming in seeking assistance and are becoming the closest to finishing their animations. I spent more time with the "Pizza fractions" animation girl. We came up with a better way to represent which slices we were referring to. Instead of dots we use two brightly coloured lines on either side of the grouping which resembled hands on a clock.

Working with the "Sharps and flats" animation girl raised some other issues which we had to decide on. As we were using musical notation we had to decide whether we wanted to include additional information like the time signature. Normally all notation would have the time signature but to reduce the amount of variables, it was also appropriate to exclude it. We decided it was better to include it as this could also raise the subsequent question "What do the numbers mean?"

The bottleneck I was predicting last week at the video editing stage is worse than I thought.  I brought in an extra computer to help cope with demand but it was still difficult to keep up.  I ended up asking the class if they minded if I synchronised their animations outside of the Storyboard sessions to save time.  No one had any objection to this which is probably for the best as we only have 4 weeks left.  My other 3 observations are:

1/ The “Pizza fractions” girl is ready to add her director’s commentary.  This is the first of its kind for the Storyboard class and possibility the first of its kind for a student authored explanatory animation anywhere in the world. 

This is what she planned to say according to the draft she had written:

“Doing my animation was really fun because I got to find out how an animation works and I got to put it all together”. 

I was hoping for more information about the learning involved so I encouraged her to think about it for another week.  I don’t want to discount her enjoyment etc. but I believe that these commentaries could end up being the most insightful data that the children produce.

2/ The “Batteries” animation girl considers herself to be ready for rendering.  Last week I looked at her slides and noticed that she was really describing what batteries do and not how they work.  I told her that she would either have to look into the chemical reaction that occurs inside a battery or accept that her focus is on what batteries do.  She has opted for describing what batteries do which is a little disappointing as she knew already this information prior to commencing the study.

3/ I read over the “Plate tectonics” animation prior to the class.  I noticed that the boy making this didn’t realise that the tectonic plates are actually part of the Earth’s crust and not some structure below the surface.  I likened it to being similar to the way a basketball is made of separate panels that are joined together.  When I mentioned this he said that he knew that. What was interesting to me was that after the session I looked at his work again and it still looks like he thinks there is a sub structure.

The following two slides are from his latest version. (He realises that the on screen text will be narrated and taken off the screen).