Students Animated Over Multi-Media Project
by Vince Long
What do you get when you combine elementary students and their stories and images with high school students and their expertise with some industrial strength multi-media authoring software? You get a great collaborative effort that produced three wonderful animations that rival what some commercial ventures are able to produce.
During the Spring 1996 semester at Billings Senior High, I had three students, Jake Perkins, Philip DeCamp, and Carmody Sloan, enrolled in an independent study of multi-media authoring. All three were learning MacroMedia Director as part of their projects, which included building an interactive presentation of their own design. Jake, a 9th-grader, designed an interactive guide to HTML, the mark-up language used to create pages on the World Wide Web. Philip, at the time a part-time 8th grader, part-time 9th-grader, delved deeply into the world of Lingo scripting as he worked on an interactive tour of Senior High. In a related project, Carmody, an 11th-grader, began building an inter-active kiosk of Senior High.
Director, the main piece of software that was used in these projects, allows the designer to combine images, sounds, video, and text on a "stage" and control them through the use of a "score." Frame animation is built into the software, letting the user easily place objects in key frames of a timeline allowing Director to fill in the in-between frames. This software does have a steep learning curve, but these students really rose to the challenge and mastered the basic concepts in a matter of weeks.
In my effort to maintain the vocational influence of the class, I decided that the students should work as a multi-media production unit, generating work that was designed by others, specifically elementary students who have great ideas, but do not have access to the technology. I contacted Susie Armstrong, a 6th-grade elementary teacher at Highland Elementary School in Billings, and pitched the idea. She selected three students, Christie Hageman, Jennifer Schroeder, and Abe Lukaczer, whom she brought over to Senior to take a look at the software and to see its capabilities. We decided to produce animated storybooks that the 6th-graders would write and illustrate. And write and illustrate they did.
Several weeks later the Senior High team received storyboards, scripts, and artwork for three original stories. Christie’s was a fantasy about a magician and a dragon. Jennifer’s was a true story about her experience in the mountains with her dog and a bear. Abe’s story described a great save made by the goal-keeper in a soccer game. I assigned one story to each of my students who proceeded with the job of scanning the images, importing the images to Director, typing in the text, and sequencing the elements in Director’s score. Many of the images needed to be dissected in Director so that the individual elements could be animated. For example, in a drawing of a dog, the legs and head were removed from the torso so that each element could be moved separately in the animation sequence. This was definitely the most time-consuming part of the project.
We were nearing the end of the semester when we had the Highland students return to record their soundtracks. Two of the stories, Christie’s and Jennifer’s, required lengthy narrations required to tell the story, while Abe’s, the story of the soccer play, needed less. After viewing the preliminary animations, the students read their scripts, which were recorded on cassette. The sound recordings were later transferred to the hard drive of a computer and saved as many separate sound files, which were then matched to the appropriate sequences of the animations. When the projects were completed, they were transferred to video tape so that the Highland students could each have a copy.
The finished productions turned out great. The Senior High students learned about everything from scanning and image processing to animation and time-management. The Highland students were able to exercise their creative writing and drawing talents and to see them displayed in a new way. Together we learned how collaboration and teamwork can bring a group of projects to a successful completion.
Montana Teachers Develop Math Adventure by Vince Long
Designing educational software is a two-sided proposition. First, the program should be, by definition, educational and, second, it should be fun. Successfully combining these two concepts into a viable product is the hope of the software producer, a desire that we, as educators, do not always see realized.
Lawrence Productions has made the mix work with their product Mystery Math Island. Part adventure game and part math quiz, the software, designed for grades 3 through 8, has been developed using the standards set forth according to the NCTM (National Council for Teachers of Mathematics). And, of special interest to readers in Montana, the concept and writing credits go to Jan Nesbit and Sandy Cameron, math teachers in Miles City.
In Mystery Math Island, the user has landed on an island that contains a hidden treasure previously left by a gang of pirates. Clues as to the location of the treasure are obtained by successfully answering a series math questions located at different sites around the island. Correct answers are rewarded with clues and/or gold pieces which can be used to buy tools for the expedition. The user has a limited amount of time to work on the solution before the pirates return to reclaim their booty.
The terrain is varied and ranges from tropical lagoons to snowcapped mountains. The graphics, while not competing with the likes of Myst or the Seventh Guest, are adequate and appropriate for the targeted age group.
There are three skill levels available: easy, for 3rd- or 4th-graders; medium, for 5th- or 6th-graders; and hard, for 7th- and 8th-graders. The math problems, a mix of both equations and story problems, cover six content areas: Geometry, Measurement, Data Patterns, Problem-solving, Number Sense, and Operations. Reading comprehension is also an element in the software’s design.
Each game session lasts about 15 minutes, depending on the skill level of the student. At the end of the play the students can print out a copy of their results, showing their achievements broken down by the math standards such as Reasoning, Estimation, Statistics and Probability, and Fractions and Decimals.
The real test came when I turned my son, a 4th-grader, loose with the program. He reported back that it was fun and the math problems seemed more like puzzles than drills. He has returned to play the games several times on his own, selecting it over other software that is less educational in concept. I consider that a pretty good endorsement.
The software, which comes on CD-ROM that works in either a Macintosh or a Windows machine, was a snap to install and ran very well on a 486DX. The price is $59.95 plus $5.00 shipping and can be ordered from YEA, Inc. Rt.2 Box 3360, Miles City, MT 59301, or call (406) 232-5266 or (406) 232-4478 for more information. You can also obtain information from the Lawrence Productions site on the World Wide Web.
Windows Screen Captures in a Snap by Vince Long
Question: I want to include an image from one of my applications in a handout for my classroom. I know that screen captures on a Mac are a pretty straight-forward operation, but how is this done on a Windows platform?
Answer: There are several programs that can be used to capture all or part of your screen. They offer various features that are not part of the built-in utility that is part of Windows. In the shareware/freeware world look for ScreenThief, WinCopy, HyperSnap, SuperClip, SnagIt, and Snapshot. Corel Draw also has a capture utility. I’ve played with some of these, but find that the utilities built right into Windows work fine for my needs.
In Windows you have three ways to capture:
1) To capture your entire desktop, that is, everything that appears on your monitor, press the Print Screen button on the keyboard. This will write the desktop image to the clipboard.
2) To capture just the window in which you are working, hold down the ALT key and press Print Screen.
3) You can also capture screens from your non-Windows applications (DOS) using the Windows utility. You may need to tweak your system settings or PIF file to allow enough system resources for this, though. From Windows, launch the DOS application. Once the DOS application is running, and you have the image showing that you want to capture, hold down the ALT key and press Enter to force the application to run in a Windows window. If it looks good, you can then use either of the two options above to capture that window.
WARNING!!! TECHIE TALK AHEAD!!!!
A word about resolution and color depth. Your Windows desktop runs at a particular resolution, such as 640 X 480, 800 X 600, 1024 X 768, or 1280 X 1024. This is the resolution of your screen measured in pixels (picture elements) or dots. The higher the numbers, the smaller things appear, giving you more desktop space. You also have a color depth that can be 16, 256, 65 thousand, or 16 million. How high the resolution and color depth can be a function of your video card and is dependent upon how much memory your video card has, as well as the software drivers that it uses. It is helpful to know the settings of your system. Windows users usually have an application that came with the video card that is run to view or change the current settings. I have an ATI card and run a Mach Utilities program to change my settings. Other systems will have something similar, though it might be buried on the hard drive somewhere or on a utility disk that came with the card. The resolution and color depth of your system will determine what you get in a screen capture.
Back to the Screen Capture...
I need to warn you about changing your video settings. Playing with the resoltion and color depth should not get you into any trouble, but BEWARE, changing the refresh rate to a number that is higher than your monitor can handle can be dangerous on some systems. This can possibly cause physical damage to the monitor.
We are almost ready to make a capture here, but what do we do with it once we have it on our clipboard? You will need to paste it into a graphical application of some kind. You could use Windows Paint, but I recommend using something a bit more robust. I have had very poor results with Windows Paint, but what can be said about a program that is free? I have used Corel Photo Paint and have found it to be a powerful tool with many special effects and plug-ins. It is inexpensive at about $65.00 and comes with a CD-ROM with hundreds of clip-art images. Adobe Photo Shop is the Rolls Royce, with a matching price tag. I also like Paint Shop Pro which is shareware and easily downloadable from many sources. If you use any one of these programs to post-process your captured image, you will be happy with the results.
It’s time to capture that image. Let’s say that I want to include int the newsletter an image from an application, such a screenshot of a piece of software that I’m reviewing. We will assume that it is a Windows application. I first check my screen resolution and set it and the color depth as high as I can. I get the image that I want up and running, then size its window to nearly fill the screen, or in most cases just leave it the way it is. Many applications run at a default resolution of 640 X 480 so the window will be a smaller image than my entire desktop. Next, I hold down the ALT key and press Print Screen. This places the active window on my clipboard.
I then launch my graphics software, such as Corel Photo Paint and, in its "Edit" menu, I select "Paste" and in its sub-menu I select "As New Document."
Now I edit the image, if it needs it. The captured image will contain the Title Bar and Menu Bar from the application, assuming that there was one. If I want to get rid of them I will use my cropping tool to select the portion of the image that I want, copy and paste it, and then throw away the original image. (Corel Capture allows you to capture just the client area of a window.)
Next, since I will output to a laser printer, I convert the image to grey scale, adjust the brightness and contrast, and any other tweaks that might strike my fancy. At this point it is a good time to save. You need to select a format that is supported by whatever application will receive the image. If the image is destined for a service bureau, they will specify what format they prefer, such as Targa (TGA), Tagged Image File (TIF), or Encapsulated Postscript (EPS). If you are going into Pagemaker, as I frequently do, save it as a TIF. In the "Save As..." dialog box select a format and give the file a name.
Place the image in your destination application. In Pagemaker you do this with the Place command. Make a test print to see how things look. If the resolution is lousy at this point, you can try to increase your screen resolution, make the application’s window larger, and go through the process again.
