2. The ExploreNet Material (Lessons 1-5.)
Lesson 1
Lesson 2
Comments on Lessons 1 and 2
Lesson 3
Lesson 4
Lesson 5
3. Overall Comments on Lessons 1-5
The machines are on a campus-wide Ethernet and are tied to an unreliable Internet connection via Orange County Public Schools. Netscape operates but neither FTP nor electronic mail are functional and reliable. The 486 computers all have 8 mb of RAM and local hard drives of 250 to 500mb capacity. Most have Sound Blasters but no speakers. All are equipped with Windows for Workgroup 3.11. In an adjacent room is a rather unreliable color image scanner attached to another computer.
The Plan. We decided to first teach students how to build WorldWideWeb pages, then transition them to building ExploreNet worlds. The reasons:
1) WWW is a very compelling medium, and it provides much motivation for students to emulate what they see. It also provides a rich library of images that can be appropriated and adapted.
2) The authoring of Web pages is very similar to the early stages of the construction of ExploreNet worlds. You must gather or create images, link them together with text files, and test. Then you must repeat this cycle many times, juggling the paint tool, text tool, File Manager and viewing tool (Netscape Navigator, or ExploreNet.)
Getting Started. 1) The Media Class at MMS consists of fifteen volunteer seventh and eighth grade students, who were selected in the spring of 1995 from a larger pool (of about 22) by the school's media specialist Vicki Bilz and Brian Scarbeau. The selection criterion was essentially based on recommendations by classroom teachers. The kids are very well-behaved, high achievers. There are 11 girls and 4 boys. Two students are African-American, one is Asian-Indian and one is Vietnamese Eurasian. The class meets for 50 minutes, five days a week.
2) From mid-August to mid-October, half the class (Group 1) received training from Scarbeau, with once-a-week visits by Moshell, in Web page building. Meanwhile the other half (Group 2) learned how to operate the MTV (Maitland TV) studio and produce the daily 5 minute morning news show. Scarbeau left suddenly in mid
September for a private school; Moshell completed the student's Web training by increasing the frequency of his visits to 2 per week, on the average.
3) From mid-October to January, Group 2 is in the process of being taught by Moshell three times a week (Mon-Wed-Fri.) while Group 1 operates MTV. After a much shortened (2 week) training on Web page building, Group II moved directly into ExploreNet world building.
In January the entire group will be reorganized to undertake major projects for the Spring semester. Projects will include video documentaries, Web-page building projects and of course further ExploreNet world development.
Group 1's Experience. Group 1 received only minimal exposure to ExploreNet; they played with the EggQuest world for most of a class period. They were not formally tasked with role-playing as Cast Members or Guests. Parent volunteers from the Extra Steps program assisted Moshell in completing Group 1's half-semester, by sporadically attending the class and watching the kids work on their assignments. However, the kids are reasonably well-behaved and Vicki Bilz was in an adjacent room, so much of the time there was no direct adult supervision.
For several technical reasons, ExploreNet was not ready for full deployment for authoring by Group 1. Also, we didn't know how much time to budget for teaching the kids about HTML and Web authoring. The students learned how to use WebWizard, which constructs a first template Web page. Then they learned how to use NotePad to modify and extend the resulting HTML. They learned how to use NetScape to capture imagery from the Web, and built richly elaborated home-pages for themselves. They used a small amount of scanned imagery, but the scanner's unreliability limited this pathway.
At the end of this protracted training, all students had completed personal Web pages (which are not yet published.). They scored 80% to 100% on a brief quiz of their ability to produce a drawn image of what would result from a page of HTML.
Group 2's Experience with HTML lasted only two weeks. The students developed an operational mastery of the edit/review cycle that was as good as that of Group 1, but when presented with the quiz requiring them to draw what NetScape would produce from HTML, most of the class did not know how to begin. Apparently the shortened learning did not allow time for them to develop a mental model of the HTML rendering process, although operationally they are quite capable of building Web pages. Each has completed a home page.
We then moved into the ExploreNet Lessons.
For each lesson, we printed out the instructional materials so that the students could have them alongside the computer and check off each item as it was done. We also put the lessons up on the Web so that outsiders could see what we're doing, and the kids could refer back.
Lesson 1. Students were given the simple 3-scene Dino world (slightly modified version of Zworld, the intro-world that comes with ExploreNet) and instructed to modify one scene. They were taught how to load the scene into ExploreNet and move characters in front of it.
Students quickly moved through the step by step instructions. A few got bogged down in trying to draw the perfect tree, but everyone managed to make some marks on the scene and load it into ExploreNet.
Because of my (Moshell's) three day-a-week schedule, the students were left to improve their scenes until my next visit.
Lesson 2. Cutting and pasting from .GIF files into ExploreNet scenes was not as satisfactory as we had hoped. Normally when you cut an image, it comes with a surrounding fragment of the previous scene. This had to be filled in. Some of the students didn't have the patience to do this, and most of them didn't really find Web images that satisfied their need to build a scene relevant to dinosaurs. They diligently surfed and sought waterfalls and mountains, but the world into which they were pasting is rather cartoon-ish, and clip-collage images don't look right when imposed into a particular style of cartoons.
The technical process of conversion was also a bit problematic. You have to make sure that the image is converted to the ExploreNet palette, and also make sure that it is stored as an RGB rather than RLE file (because ExploreNet doesn't accept RLE for objects.) During this lesson we discovered that Explorenet DOES accept RLE for background scenes, and reported to Charlie Hughes. He will find out why there is a difference and fix it.
Comments on Lessons 1 and 2. Level 1 criticism: The plans for Lessons 1 and 2 should be illustrated with some of the work the students did. They should also be modified so as to describe the process without critically depending on Paint Shop Pro, but we're not sure what other tools may be used. PSP has the virtue of being universally available and free for 30 days. (We plan to negotiate a donation for the research project, and perhaps a special school-site price for later users.)
Level 2 criticism: These plans should perhaps be illustrated with many more figures that show how-to information. Several students exhibited a marked reluctance to read straight text, in order to learn how to do something. While we may rant and rail against "illiteracy", these are bright selected kids - not low performers. We should consider paying attention to different cognitive styles in our guidance materials.
Mundane matters. We should also have provided the students with diskettes so that they could save their work. Our network is not a safe place to leave one's work overnight, as other students will disrupt it or individual computers will fail. Two of our nine machines have been virused during our first five lessons, and then removed from the lab, so those two students had to start over building their worlds.
The lesson handouts should be 3-hole punched and the students should have been instructed to store them for later reference. The handouts should use a single consecutive page numbering system so that the next item would work.
An INDEX should be prepared, so that students could refer back to a skill they may have forgotten. In the web-page version of the files, this would be easily done, but it's hard to look at a web page and ExploreNet and Paint Shop Pro all at the same time. Paper is easier.
TECHNOLOGY PROBLEM: Assuming we use Netscape/Web to produce manuals, we don't get page numbers from printouts in Netscape. So we should be numbering our sections, so that indexing would be useful for paper documents. We'll start doing this at Lesson 6, and retro-fit the older lessons later.
The experimenter should keep a notebook (at least as an example to the students) and should write any observations in the notebook and date them. Presently a pocket cassette recorder is being used; its contents should be transcribed into the basic data notebook.
Lesson 3. This was a popular lesson, because the students got to design their own dinosaur. Also the printed materials have pictures in them, which helps. Some of the kids only managed to decorate their first (resting) pose; others did all eight poses with different patterns so that the dino 'twinkles' when it moves. Others managed to produce a consistent coloring through all the frames.
Lesson 4. Students had no particular problem learning how to produce eggs for their species of dino, and to modify the PATHWAY.PRP file so that this prop appeared in the scene instead of the kettle (arbitrarily selected as an object to replace.) The transfer of knowledge from Web page-building really paid off in their ability to cognitively navigate between Notepad, ExploreNet and Paint Shop Pro.
We took each species sub-group aside and asked them to brainstorm about behavior rules for their species. We provided them with a starting point of "pterodactyl" behavior (a species not yet in the game.) The following suggestions emerged:
BRONTO:
Eat - grass, leftover treetops from bronto
Eat - eggs, or eat scraps after a T-rex has made an attack.
Attack - chances of success should be much greater if two raptors attack at once.
These notes and ideas went back to UCF and led to the quick design of a first round of Dino World behaviors. These were implemented in a simple cardboard-and
paper board game that was used in Lesson 6 as a next step in testing the dino world's rules.
However, the behavior rules which we can implement in today's ExploreNet (in time for trials next week!) are much more limited than some of the kids' ideas. For instance we have no feasible way within today's scripting environment to make some dinos able to swim, others not. So we didn't put these capabilities into the board game either.
These notes and ideas went back to UCF and led to the quick design of a first round of Dino World behaviors. These were implemented in a simple "board game"
The main problem that deranged our plans was the "marathon effect" - namely, that by this point the kids are somewhat strung out in their accomplishments. The leaders (about four of the class) finish every assignment on time and have artifacts to prove it. The middle group (two more) are within reaching distance; they have fragmentary examples of each item. The trailers (two who are easily distracted and one who was sick for a week) have several missing elements - e. g. they may have lost their decorated dinosaur or their eggs, due to file mixups, or never painted a background scene.
Probably this kind of problem would be better managed by a classroom teacher with more experience at this age level. Moshell attempted to get the leading kids to help the slower ones to catch up, with mixed success. A great deal of interpersonal politics tended to derail such efforts. Individual tutoring by Moshell (while neglecting the rest of the class) helped to some extent. However, because of decreased attention by Moshell to the overall class, nobody actually got to the point of making the boulder into scenery (Step 5 of Lesson 5.) This is relatively unimportant for the next stage of the lesson development.
At times of frustration, our trailing students have indicated that they're tired of working on ExploreNet. When asked if they'd rather switch to MTV, they demurred. But they are sometimes observed sneaking in a game of Solitaire when they think I'm not looking.
Our Hospital/Homebound students have been examining Thor's World, an elaborate four-player ExploreNet quest produced by a team of UCF students, and have pronounced it "boring". We then challenged them to figure out how to make it more interesting. That may be more a literary and creative problem than a technical one; we'll see what develops.
Looking Ahead. In order to motivate the notion of scripting and the construction of behaviors, we conducted the brainstorming session in Lesson 4 and will reveal the results to the kids (in the form of behavioral rules in a playable board game) in Lesson 6. The suggestions they make for changes to the rules will be incorporated into the software for the first full "dino day" in Lesson 7, thus making them aware of the specific ways in which they can design the behavioral repertoires of the dinosaurs.
Lesson 7 will be an in-school dino experience; One or both of our Hospital/Homebound students may visit the class on that day to see the action. Lesson 8 will be our first long-distance demo (to the students at Coral Springs.) Then Christmas holidays will disrupt everything. Ho, ho, ho ... we could all use the rest.
You can now return to the directory of Experience Reports. You can also return to the Tutorial Table of Contents, or to the ExploreNet Home Page.
Lesson 5. In this lesson we attempted to create boulders and other props behind which dinos could lurk. The intent was to get kids used to planning a scene and props at the same time, using multiple windows in Paint Shop Pro.