MITE6323 – Martin Lau’s Blog

Topic: The Water Cycle
Developed by: Dorothy TSANG Tik Man and Martin LAU Wai Chung

Please click the links below for the final version of our group assignment:

• Presentation (HTML+SWF)
• Source file (FLA)

My Contribution to This Project

I was responsible for:

• Consolidating the ideas of out group to develop the storyboard. The collection of the materials for the contents is equally contributed by me and my partner.
• Developing some of the interactivities of the learning object, like the part “How is evaporation affected”
• Finding and adding sound effects
• Refining the text to be displayed in the learning object
• Assembling the graphical elements done by my partner to make the complete object

Discussion

The water cycle is a topic taught in primary level General Studies and junior secondary level Geography. Students are required to understand that the water on Earth moves in a continuous cycle and to know various stages of the cycle. Traditionally, students learn the water cycle by reading the flowchart and text in the textbook. Our learning object, on the other hand, shows the whole cycle in an interactive way. According to Information Pickup Theory (Gibson, 1979; Neisser, 1976), using motion pictures in a visual representation stimulates students and facilitates their understanding. Moreover, Clark & Paivio (1991) stated that presenting information in both graphical and textual forms enhances students’ recognition.

For textual information, minimal but essential information is shown in the presentation at first. Details are hidden by default but they are available when needed (by pointing over or clicking a label). Not showing all the details at once lets viewers have a grasp of the basics of the water cycle first, without congesting their minds with too much information.
 
In traditional lectures, students are passively spoon-fed with the concepts of evaporation, transpiration, condensation, precipitation, runoff and ground water in the water cycle. In our learning object, materials are given to let students construct hypotheses and draw conclusions, as pointed out by Bruner’s Constructivist Theory (1996). For example, in the “How evaporation is affected” part, students can explore how the evaporation rate relates to the air temperature, relative humidity and wind speed on their own by dragging the sliders.

How can the Learning Object be Used?

Self-initiated learning takes place when the subject matter arouses students’ interest (Rogers & Freiberg, 1994). We can ask the students to think if the water they drink is the same water dinosaurs drank. Then they study the learning object for the answer. During the problem solving process, they master the unending flow of the water. Further, through the various experiments in the website mentioned below, they can grasp the concept of each stage in water cycle:
http://www-k12.atmos.washington.edu/k12/pilot/water_cycle/teacherpage.html#goals
 
Overall Experience on the Course

Through the various tasks in the course, I think I have learnt the basics of designing effective interactive visual representations. Of course, having the knowledge alone is not enough. I have to do more hands-on works to further sharpen-up my skills and techniques.

On the technical side, although I have known some basics of Flash before, I still learn something from this course, such as the making of sliders and to use it to convey information.

References:

• Bruner, J. (1996). The Culture of Education. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
• Clark, J. M. & Paivio, A. (1991). “Dual coding theory and education”. Educational Psychology Review, 3(3), 149-170.
• Gibson, J.J. (1979). The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
• Neisser, U. (1976). Cognition and Reality. San Francisco: W.H. Freeman.
• Rogers, C.R. & Freiberg, H.J. (1994). Freedom to Learn (3rd Ed). Columbus: Merrill/Macmillan.

Here are some of the comments from our fellow classmates up to 15th May, showing the strengths and weaknesses of our prototype. Our responses to the comments as well as the revisions to be done to the prototype are also listed.

Thanks again for all of your comments and suggestions.

[1 May: The prototype is updated. A preloader is added so that viewers can see the progress while the file is loading and the "How is evaporation affected" box is now working]

Dorothy and I have made a prototype of our Group Assignment. You can have a look at it by clicking the following link:

Learning Object: The Water Cycle
http://iln.cite.hku.hk/com/1374/users/wclau/grpassgn/index.htm

The following features are yet to be completed:

• The showing of information box(es) when a label (in pale yellow) is clicked. (Currently, only the “Evaporation” label has such feature);
• Further animation effects and interactivities to facilitate the explanation of the water cycle.

Your comments are welcome and I am sorry for the late submission since I have been extremely busy with my office work during the past weeks.

The following is a short photo story I made with Microsoft Photo Story. It is about the evolution of calculation tools:

I hope you will enjoy watching and your comments are warmly welcome.

Photo credits:

• Abacus: http://www.dentaku-museum.com/hc/computer/abacus/2-5-abacus/2-5-abacus-2.jpg

• Adding machine: http://www.officemuseum.com/IMagesWWW/Burroughs_No._5_Adding_Machine_chassis_cb000243_OM.JPG

• Electronic calculators: http://www.shopping.hp.com/webapp/shopping/popups/seeBigger.jsp?image_path=/shopping/images/products/f2223aa_400.jpg&prod_name=HP+39gs+Graphing+Calculator

• Finger counting (Dactylonomy): http://www.laputanlogic.com/articles/2004/05/11-0001.html

• Mathematical tables: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2e/Abramowitz%26Stegun.page97.agr.jpg

• Supercomputers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Columbia_Supercomputer_-_NASA_Advanced_Supercomputing_Facility.jpg

• Tally marks: http://thesaurus.maths.org/mmkb/entry.html;jsessionid=2A6E49AC8912CCE3964744552CFAB724?action=entryByConcept&id=1838&expand=0&msglang=de

Here is our storyboard for the Group Assignment:
grpassgn-storyboard.doc

For this storyboard, I was responsible for the consolidation while Dorothy was responsible for the drawing of the water cycle diagram (using PowerPoint). Data collection was jointly done by both of us.

Your comments are welcome.

I will team with Dorothy Tsang for completing the Group Assignment. After discussions, we propose to develop a learning object for presenting the water cycle. The target audience of the proposed learning object will be students of senior primary to junior secondary levels.

We will first gather the materials about the water cycle and will see how the concepts can be implemented with Adobe Flash.

After some research (please see References below), Dorothy and I have found out the shape of raindrops. Please click the picture below to download our visual representation:

http://iln.cite.hku.hk/com/1374/users/wclau/RaindropShapes.ppt

My Contribution to This Task

For completing this task, I was responsible for:

• consolidating the overall design of the diagram after discussing with my partner;
• drawing the different shapes of raindrops; and
• finalizing the text to be placed on the diagram. 

My Reflection on This Task 

The difficulty of this task is a bit higher than the previous ones since we have to search for the information ourselves about the stuff to be displayed. At first, we encountered many websites from which we found that, as Dr. Churchill mentioned in the class, raindrops are clearly not teardrop-shaped. However, as we read on, we could see that the shape presented at one website is the opposite of those shown in another. Therefore, as in other research, we have to take a close and critical look at the materials in hand, so as to make sure that the information is not misleading and making students to construct misconceptions (”Comments on ‘Atmosphere’ Visual Design Task“, Point 2). Bearing this in mind, we found the websites listed in References which are issued by more authoritative sources (like the US Geological Survey) and backed by stronger evidence (such as the diagrams, photos and formulas in http://www.fluidmech.net/tutorials/raindrops/drop_flow.htm).

Like the previous task, we added some interactivity into this design, not only to make the presentation more interesting to watch, but to allow the detailed information to be shown only upon viewers’ request. We think not showing all the details on a single screen makes the design less scattered and enables viewers to get the main information (the actual shape of raindrops) at their very first glance.

References (The Shape of Raindrops)

• Cramer, M.S. (2004). The Shape of Raindrops. Retrieved from http://www.fluidmech.net/tutorials/raindrops/raindrop.htm

• Fraser, A.B. (n.d.). Bad Rain. Retrieved from http://www.ems.psu.edu/~fraser/Bad/BadRain.html

• Heidorn, K.C. (July 1, 2000). Weather Almanac for July 2000 – Raindrops, So Many Raindrops. Retrieved from http://www.islandnet.com/~see/weather/almanac/arc2000/alm00jul.htm

• U.S. Geological Survey (September 14, 2005). Are raindrops shaped like teardrops? Retrieved from http://ga.water.usgs.gov/edu/raindropshape.html

Please click the picture below to download the visual representation of the Earth’s atmosphere made by me and my partner, Dorothy:

 
http://iln.cite.hku.hk/com/1374/users/wclau/Atomsphere.ppt

My Contribution to This Task

For completing this task, I am responsible for:

• consolidating the overall design of the diagram after discussing with my partner;
• drawing the background of each layer of the atmosphere;
• drawing and placing the objects related to the stratosphere;
• finalizing the text to be placed on the diagram. 

My Reflection on This Task 

The passage to be interpreted is quite straightforward and it was not difficult to determine the important information to be represented in the diagram. The main challenge was to decide whether we had to sacrifice some accuracy when representing the information – if the diagram was drawn strictly to the scale, most of the diagram would be empty space while the portions of the stratosphere and troposphere would be too small to show their features. After discussions, we drew the layers roughly according to their thickness, while giving as much portions to the stratosphere and troposphere as possible.

Regarding the placement of the descriptions for each of the layers, we decided to add some interactivity so that each of the descriptions appears only when the viewer moves the mouse pointer over the corresponding layer. In our opinion, this can make the overall representation clean (rather than crowded with text and graphics) and let the viewing experience more interesting.

Finally, we looked up this Wikipedia article for the molecular structure of ozone.

I have made a PowerPoint slide which introduces myself. You can download it from the address below, have a look at it and see if you can understand what I am from the slide :

http://iln.cite.hku.hk/com/1374/users/wclau/AboutMartin.ppt

Hi, it is Martin and this is my first post to my MITE6323 blog. Obviously the purpose of making this post is to try out the features of EduBlogs, which is powered by the WordPress Blog Platform. For example, I have just discovered that we can insert emoticons into the text by typing their conventions, like and , to make it more interesting to read.

You can click the About Me link above to know more about me. Thanks and welcome to my blog again !