Learning Affordances of Collaborative Educational Multimedia Design by Children.

This paper presents and discusses the results of a project in which seven teams of fifth and sixth grade students were involved in designing and implementing interactive multimedia resources in science for younger children, using the Microworlds(TM) Logo programming environment. It was found that students improved significantly in their science understanding and programming skills. The benefits and problems of integrating science content with multimedia design are discussed, as well as reasons why the quality of dynamic and interactive components in students' multimedia production proved to be a better indicator of students' learning than the quantity of multimedia produced. The paper examines various program functions and the multimedia content of the final software products and evaluates the software in terms of team and individual contributions. Two tables present data on distribution of screen page functions and distribution of "design differentiated scores." Contains 17 references. (Author/DLS)