Abstract

Storyboard is a practitioner action research project involving eight students from an inner Melbourne Primary School who created explanatory animations in 2011. This study introduces the director’s commentary as a unique genre of research data which requires the author to articulate and often reorganise their own thinking. The children's voices as multimedia authors are present in these director’s commentaries where you hear the rationale behind the numerous decisions that the children make in their own words.  My claim here is that explanatory animations can be conceptual models. These models are intrinsically preserved as digital evidence of the children's evolving thoughts and representations. Storyboard provides a clear chronology of the children's conceptual consolidation. 

The process of explanatory animation creation is well documented as the evolving creations of the students are uploaded and hyperlinked as primary sources of data. The Storyboard project used a multiple methods (QUAL-qual) design where the multimodal data generated by the students is presented in varying levels of detail and recontextualised for multiple levels of analysis.

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