Topic: The Water Cycle
Developed by: Dorothy TSANG Tik Man and Martin LAU Wai Chung
Please click the links below for the final version of our group assignment:
My Contribution to This Project
Working in pair, I was responsible for the collection of the materials for the contents (which is equally contributed by me and my partner Martin), drawing most of the graphical elements, setting the sliders in the “How is evaporation affected?” part, and making the animation in the “Groundwater” part.
Discussion
The water cycle is a topic taught in primary level General Studies and junior secondary level Geography. Students are required to understand that the water on Earth moves in a continuous cycle and to know various stages of the cycle. Traditionally, students learn the water cycle by reading the flowchart and text in the textbook. Our learning object, on the other hand, shows the whole cycle in an interactive way. According to Information Pickup Theory (Gibson, 1979; Neisser, 1976), using motion pictures in a visual representation stimulates students and facilitates their understanding. Moreover, Clark & Paivio (1991) stated that presenting information in both graphical and textual forms enhances students’ recognition.
For textual information, minimal but essential information is shown in the presentation at first. Details are hidden by default but they are available when needed (by pointing over or clicking a label). Not showing all the details at once lets viewers have a grasp of the basics of the water cycle first, without congesting their minds with too much information.
In traditional lectures, students are passively spoon-fed with the concepts of evaporation, transpiration, condensation, precipitation, runoff and ground water in the water cycle. In our learning object, materials are given to let students construct hypotheses and draw conclusions, as pointed out by Bruner’s Constructivist Theory (1996). For example, in the “How evaporation is affected” part, students can explore how the evaporation rate relates to the air temperature, relative humidity and wind speed on their own by dragging the sliders.
How can the Learning Object be Used?
Self-initiated learning takes place when the subject matter arouses students’ interest (Rogers & Freiberg, 1994). We can ask the students to think if the water they drink is the same water dinosaurs drank. Then they study the learning object for the answer. During the problem solving process, they master the unending flow of the water. Further, through the various experiments in the website mentioned below, they can grasp the concept of each stage in water cycle:
http://www-k12.atmos.washington.edu/k12/pilot/water_cycle/teacherpage.html#goals
Overall Experience on the Course
By accomplishing this task, as well as various tasks throughout the course, I have gone through the detailed steps including drafting design plans and developing prototypes, which bring me fruitful experiences of implementing effective, interactive visual representations. With the skills learnt in this module, I think I can try to develop some interactive visual representations for my teaching in the future.
References:
- Bruner, J. (1996). The Culture of Education. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
- Clark, J. M. & Paivio, A. (1991). “Dual coding theory and education”. Educational Psychology Review, 3(3), 149-170.
- Gibson, J.J. (1979). The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
- Neisser, U. (1976). Cognition and Reality. San Francisco: W.H. Freeman.
- Rogers, C.R. & Freiberg, H.J. (1994). Freedom to Learn (3rd Ed). Columbus: Merrill/Macmillan.
