Working With HyperStudio
The Lincoln Project.
A Whole Elementary School works together to
create an interactive, Hyperstudio Book dealing with conflict
resolution.
Lincoln Elementary School in lovely Portsmouth, Ohio, gave us a
jingle and asked us to come in and help all of their students work
together to create a "product". Their school district was
beginning to bring some brand new computers into the district so
the Lincoln staff wanted to introduce the computers to their
students in a fun and exciting way. They asked Silly Billy's World
to present options for a creative writing project.
They decided to go with the, "Hyperstudio" production option.
The school staff decided to create a story that dealt with conflict
resolution. At the beginning of the project I thought that we would
write one story. You know, come up with a story line, make up
characters, break the story into three parts and then write and
rewrite the story. finally, the students would create the graphics
on the computer in a program called, "Kid Pix."
To find a story line, we asked each classroom to come up with
a story line. Each of the classrooms did, but each one was very
different. It was difficult to decide which one to use. Then it
hit us. Let's us them all. This is Hyperstudio. Let's make the
story interactive and educational.
It ended up that each classroom had come up with a story line
made up of a conflict situation that could take place in an
elementary school environment. So, we went back to the
classrooms, first through fifth grade, and asked them to come up
with three wrong ways for the characters in their storylines to
solve their problem and one right way to solve the problem.
The End and The Beginning of the Story
We decided that the middle of the story would be more like a
computer game. The user would be presented with the problem, then
they would be given answers to choose from. The user of the
computer program would have 8 problems do go through. Conflict
situations such as tattle telling, bullying, lying, stealing,
teasing, and the like.
To put the whole story together, the students came up with a
couple of characters that had decided to create a computer program
in Hyperstudio for the science fair. We plugged in these
characters to the beginning and the end of the "story."
Creating Graphics.
All of the students in the school were introduced to the
graphics program called Kid Pix. If you are thinking of the Kid
Pix that used to have only 16 colors and was used on those old
Apple II e's, you're mistaken. The new Kid Pix is out of this
world and worth your review.
Each of the students were asked to draw faces. Faces from the
front view and the side view. The same students used Kid Pix to
draw clothing. Then, the students were asked to draw backgrounds.
Kid Pix makes it very easy to do all of the above.
Using cut, copy and paste from the edit menu, we put the
faces, clothing, and backgrounds together creating interactive
scenes. Then, we trained a group of students to put the entire
project together in Hyperstudio using sound effects and commands.
Lovely Portsmouth, Ohio is somewhat rural. Many of the
students had not had much time to spend with cool computers that
had been brought in by the school system. At the end of each
hands on session, students would almost have to be pried away from
"their" computers.
The students and teachers fell in love with their new
electronic friends. I look forward to many more progressive
projects from Principal, Hilda Drake and her fantastic students and
staff.
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Hey, tell us what you think.............
bill@sillybilly.com