Kotaro Matsushita, Hayato Nishida, Shingo Furuya,Kenneth J. Mackin, Hideo Suzuki, Eiji Nunohiro

Tokyo University of Information Sciences, 4-1 Onaridai, Wakaba-ku, Chiba 265-8501, Japanmatusita@rsch.tuis.ac.jp

Development of Teaching Materials using 3-Dimentional Development of Teaching Materials using 3-Dimentional Computer Graphics Animation in Elementary EducationComputer Graphics Animation in Elementary Education

The 19th annual conference of the Society for Information Technology and Teacher Education

2008.3.3-7 (Las Vegas, Nevada, USA)

Background Previous works

(1) CG animation material to follow textbook contents The CG animation teaching material is aimed at rousing the interest of

the students towards the contents of the textbooks, and to improve the comprehension of the textbook contents.

(2) CG animation material to run on standard PC hardware　 Elementary school computing hardware specification may be limited

compared to college and other higher education institutes. (3) CG animation material to be easily modifiable and extendible

Elementary school teachers often have limited time to spend on preparing new teaching material.

Fig.2 Animations of individual scenes.

Fig.1 Language (Japanese) teaching material.

POV-Ray scene file Conclusions

There are a growing number of elementary schools and high schools that install personal computers

It is possible to teach many subjects with Computer Graphics in schools

We developed 3-dimensional CG animation teaching materials using CG programming language

CG Material is effective for Education in elementary schools

(a) Scene1

(a) Scene1

(b) Scene2

(c) Scene3

(d) Scene4

[1]G.J.Coulthard, P.R.Graves, S.E.Hutchinson-Clifford (2003). Microsoft PowerPoint 2003, McGraw-Hill.[2]K.Shintani, A.Inoue, M.Hirano, A.Ueda, S.Kaneda, Y.Miyata (2004). Practice of PBL using information technology in early childhood education, Proceedings of the 3rd Forum on Information Technology, pp.355-356 (in Japanese)[3]K.Mouri, M.Suzuki, T.Yasuda, S.Yokoi (2002). Production and Practical Use of Teaching Materials based on 3-dimensional Computer-graphics Technology with Collaboration in Education of Astronomy, The Journal of Information and Systems in Education , Vol.1, No.1, pp.3513-3516.[4]Joey Lott (2006). Flash 8 Cookbook, O'Reilly.[5]http://www.povray.org/

Generally, elementary schools will have limited computing environments compared to colleges. Further, elementary school teachers have many class hours as well as other duties, so time in creating new teaching material is often very limited. Therefore, when introducing CG animation teaching materials in elementary schools, the system must be easily installed in standard computing equipment in elementary schools and the electronic teaching material must be easily modified and extended in short periods of time.

Development policy

Outline of the research

CG animation for teaching material using PowerPoint [1] to create story boards [2], and Flash [3] to create picture books [2] has been previously reported. Electronic story boards using PowerPoint can display still images sequentially, but do not fully support CG animation. Further, these are centered on 2-dimensional (2-D) images. Research on fully 3-D animation teaching material for astronomy [4] using C programming language and Open GL has been reported. But OpenGL requires specific technical knowledge and preparation of computing environment, and thus is difficult to apply directly in elementary schools.

Developers must create program source code that the object and background definitions and control section are clearly separated so that users can easily find and modify the necessary sections of the source code. (Fig.3)

CG animation teaching material was developed with emphasis on the following 3 points.

Development environment Development procedure

Consideration of teaching material contents

Creation of draft image

Creation of CG animation

Creation of CG for each scene

3-dimentional CG animation teaching materials CG animation

References

(1) Scene 1A young crow feels the moonlight and looks up towards the sky. The young crow decides to look for a place where the beautiful moon can be seen well.(2) Scene 2The young crow meets a raccoon. The raccoon tells the crow that the moon can be seen well from a tall mountain.(3) Scene 3The young crow meets a lost squirrel on the way to the mountain. The crow helps to find the lost squirrel’s home from the sky.(4) Scene 4The young crow next meets a sly fox. The young crow asks the fox for directions to the mountain, not knowing that the fox was a trickster. The fox lies to the young crow and gives false directions.(5) Scene 5The young crow becomes lost and flies anxiously. A kind owl shows the crow the exit of the forest.(6) Scene 6Upon arriving home, the young crow realizes that the beautiful moon can be best seen from the top of the tallest tree in the very forest he lives in.

Fig.1 shows an example of a developed teaching material used in language (Japanese) class for 1st, 2nd, 3rd grade elementary school class and Fig.2 shows animations of individual scenes. The story is an original story. The outline of each scene is described below.

(b) Scene2 (c) Scene3 (d) Scene4 (e) Scene5 (f) Scene6

(e) Scene5

(f) Scene6

PentiumD-2.8GHz, 512MB-RAM PC running Windows XP for the OS was used for development. POV-Ray [5] was used for developing CG animation. The reasons for selecting POV-Ray are the following.

Fig.3 POV-Ray scene file.

• POV-Ray provides an efficient development environment.

• POV-Ray is freeware that is widely used thought the world. Since POV-Ray is freeware, the software can be installed without financial restrictions.

• There are a large number of references and sample program resources which can be easily retrieved through the Internet.

• The programs can be easily modified and extended by beginners.

• When using CG animation as teaching material, the contents can be modified and extended by changing only the necessary parts of the program source code, most often sections which describe the motion or rotation of objects.

• Installing the developed teaching material and making the required modification and extensions to the program source code of the teaching material to match the needs for individual school classrooms is the realistic approach.

Object section

Background section

Control section