Now you see it

The use of animations appears as a natural fit for teaching science. Humans are visual creatures so what better way to explain how scientific concepts the electrostatics works than be a moving visual representation.

Hence as a science teacher, I have endeavored to incorporate both digital and analog animations into my lessons and will be presenting my experiences at ISTE in June as well as discussing how I use augmented reality in the classroom.

Yet when exploring the research on the effectiveness of animations, there appears, at present, little evidence that students learn more from a digital moving image than they would from a still picture or a physical model.

However, the research is slowly teasing out important clues on new ways to use digital animation and simulation to deepen students’ understanding of what is happening in the physical world. 

As an educator, digital animations have enormous potential in science education. If created with correct insight, moving images can engage and motivate students, make unseen worlds visible, and impart an intuitive feel for abstract concepts.

An example of insights derived from the research is that the images need to move at speed for people to take in all the information they convey.

Animations can also need to reduce distraction with color, sound, or extraneous movement.

To illustrate this point, consider a simulation that includes text, students have to split their attention between the image and the words. Yet, without text or graphics signals, students have a hard time figuring out what the important information is from the images before them. If text is used place them close to the images they are describing.

If animations include voice-over, synchronize with the images using narration in a conversational style.

So now we have from research, some pointers on how to create effective animations, so how can we apply this for students to create effective animations in lessons?

Scientific concepts are complicated to novices, as an example, consider chemical equilibria, there are many ideas at play (particle theory, kinetic theory, reversibility, etc.) that must be pieced together to make sense of the concept. However, these ideas can be represented in each step through animation. This includes drawings, written labels, narration, and other modes of expressing ideas. Thus, this is a “multimodal” process – many different modes of representation are used. The use of animation facilitates student engagement with different forms of representation and can effectively communicate an idea or understanding.

Storyboarding like the example above can then be used by students to develop animations of these complex concepts. This involves two major aspects of computational thinking - decomposition and abstraction. Essentially, for large complicated processes, a storyboard helps students break that process down (or decompose) into particular “chunks,” and then focus on how to represent each “chunk” in an effective way. Narrowing a problem down and thinking specifically about how to represent an abstract idea more simply and that one idea can support students’ efforts to think about specific processes or mechanisms. Understanding the “why” of what we observe is the essence of inquiry, and tools that help students do this are crucially important.

Many concepts in science that students encounter are complicated: the water cycle, mitosis, electric circuits, Newton’s laws, etc. Any opportunity to break these ideas down into smaller more manageable chunks provides students with more focused and directed sense-making opportunities. A storyboard begins this process of decomposition, and going from storyboard to animation is where students use their representational capacities to communicate ideas. Sequencing representations from one mode (say written language) into another (say a drawing) is a powerful exercise for understanding the processes and mechanisms at play in science and further evidence of the power of animation in classrooms.