tailieunhanh - Making Sense of Animation: How do Children Explore Multimedia Instruction?

We conduct our business primarily in two studios—in Glendale, California, where we are headquartered, and in Redwood City, California. Our Glendale animation campus, where the majority of our animators and production staff are based, was custom built in 1997. We generally retain the exclusive copyright and other intellectual property rights to all of our projects and characters, other than (i) co-ownership of the copyright and other intellectual property rights (including characters) in and to Flushed Away, which was co-produced with Aardman Animations, Ltd. (“Aardman”), (ii) Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, a film owned by Aardman for which we generally have worldwide distribution rights in. | CN 7 CT Making Sense of Animation How do Children Explore Multimedia Instruction Mireille Betrancourt and Alain Chassot I A-Headintroduction With the increasing sophistication of computer technologies and decreasing production costs multimedia documents offering highly animated and interactive graphics are becoming ubiquitous in instructional materials. However research on how learners process such multimedia information in order to construct a mental model of the learning material has emerged only in the last decade. From an applied perspective a key issue is whether multimedia documents are actually beneficial to learning when compared with more traditional materials. It is therefore important to identify the conditions under which educational benefit is more likely to occur. From a more fundamental research perspective many issues still remain to be thoroughly investigated. These include questions about how people process multimedia documents and what this processing may tell us about cognitive processes involved in constructing mental models. In this chapter we focus on instructional multimedia documents that include animated graphics or animation. An instructional multimedia document can be defined as a presentation involving words and pictures that is intended to foster learning Mayer 2001 p. 3 . More generally words refer not only to verbal information in natural language but also to symbolic information that can accompany graphics such as formulae in mathematics or chemistry. For the purposes of this chapter animation is defined as . any application which generates a series of frames so that each frame appears as an alteration of the previous one and where the sequence of frames is determined either by the designer or the user Bétrancourt and Tversky 2000 p 313 . This definition encompasses not only computer-controlled animation but also interactive animation in which the user can control the pace or the events occurring in the presentation. In this chapter