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Feb. 15, 2001
Feature
Anatomy of a CD-ROM
Come with us as we dissect an award-winning, student-created multimedia project.
By: Hall Davidson
The pre-digital adage was that you couldn't judge a book by its cover. That adage held up despite generations of consumers who chose books based to a great degree on stylized cover art depicting a western, romance, or other genre. By the same token, student electronic projects, including multimedia and Web pages, also rely rather heavily on the "cover" to reveal what's inside. "Cover," in these cases, might mean the title card in a HyperStudio stack, the home page of a Web site, or, in the instance of the kid-created CD-ROM we dissect here, the menu of a simply wonderful multimedia project built with Tom Snyder Productions' mPower.
It is often evident from the first peek whether a project involves group work and multiple approaches to learning such as art, music, or improvisation. Students will almost always throw in everything they've got early in a program.
The "Creatures of the Mojave Desert" CD, a winning entry from the California Student Media and Multimedia Festival, begins with a title page accompanied by the slow beat of original music. The music increases in volume as colorful scrolling text moves across the screen, ultimately transforming into a splash page with original art. Then, out of nowhere, one of the project mentors pops onto the screen in full-motion video and gives a sly and enthusiastic explanation of what the project is about. Noteworthy enough in a commercial CD-ROM, this element is remarkable in a project produced by a regular class of fourth- and fifth-graders from the Katherine Finchy Elementary School in Palm Springs. It is also an exceptional example of how technological and non-technological skills can be brought together by the right kind of teachers in the right kind of learning environment with the right kind of project. These students had all three: they were guided by a strong veteran teacher, Bob Smith, working in conjunction with a high-powered district technology specialist, Linda Reynolds, in an enlightened small district. Reynolds challenged this group early in the year to come up with a project topic, and they responded with a multimedia project on the desert biome that would see them writing poetry, taking pictures, and visiting a desert museum where they would capture video of a live mountain lion. Here's exactly how they did it.
The project opens with a rectangle over which the title plays. As the words finish scrolling, a splash page with original art directly relating to the curricular objectives pops onto the screen. The authoring program, mPower, does the work of scrolling the text-a humble trick. In mPower there are no templates to fall back on, so the background rectangle and the art (drawings of the creatures of the desert) were done by hand, scanned into the computer, and polished and cut out using Photoshop. The music-pleasant light jazz-was created by students in SmartSound, a menu-driven program that assembles customized lengths of original (and copyright-free) music in a variety of genres. It is worth noting that the student authors also built in a back door that skips the opening page; if you click on the teacher's name during the opening, you jump straight to the menu. As Hollywood editors have known for years, you can get really sick of repeating music, no matter how agreeable it is on the first hearing.
As this splash page ends, the menu comes up. This is where things get really good. David Solowitz, your fifth-grade student guide, appears. He sports a bent-brim hat and a dead-on Australian accent. In laudably jerk-free video, David walks you through the menu and prepares you for the work that lies within. He sets up the poetry, art, and videos in each of the sections that branch from the menu. This highly engaging introduction by a student is the kind of opening that would pull even the greatest Luddite past the "cover" and into the "book."
The making of the video segments is an example of what can happen when kids are sufficiently adept with technology to be able to shift direction when they see something good. The students worked in groups based around each of the subcategories of desert creatures: insects, mammals, and so on. The original idea was that each group would tape its own video segment. But when they discovered David's ability in front of the camera, they immediately pressed him to do all the segments. All the video segments were shot on one day, in about forty minutes; the menu introduction was taped only three times.
They shot David with a Panasonic digital camcorder. For the menu, they grabbed a screen shot while mPower was running. To drop him into the menu, they set up a chromakey screen (essentially, a portable green wall) behind David. The single color of the chromakey allowed the students to drop in an image behind David, using the technique most commonly associated with weather forecasters. While he was talking, David had no idea exactly what was going to come up behind him.
Once the video was shot, it was FireWired into a computer (Power Mac G4) where Kevin Smith, a fourth-grader, used Final Cut Pro, an editing program, to replace the green background with images. (The same technique can be used with older, analog equipment. A video mixer will mix chromakey even with older camcorders, and Adobe Premiere will work on PCs to perform the same task.)
In each of the subcategories (insects, mammals, and so on) are found original poetry, scientific data, animal sounds and tracks, and interesting facts on the individual desert creatures. On each creature's menu page, David was electronically placed against photographs the students had scanned. In some sections there are also videos shot in the desert, though much of the desert video was discarded by the student teams as "too boring" once they saw it in place. (This is the kind of editing sensibility family videographers could use.) It also helped that the video was put through Cleaner, a software program from Terran that let the students shrink the QuickTime movies from 30 MB down to 3 MB while also brightening the image and improving the sound.
Finally, students burned their creation onto blank CDs using Toast software and a LaCie CD burner. Professional-looking labels were printed using CD Stomper Pro.
The final project was presented at the Computer-Using Educators (CUE) conference in Sacramento last fall, where the students and their projects livened up the usual banquet speech. Afterward, the students received the fastest, most spontaneous standing ovation I have ever seen at a conference banquet. And the audience really only saw the cover. The students smiled and shrugged a little bit as if to say, "This is all it takes to get on the banquet circuit?"
To make a CD like "Creatures of the Mojave Desert," it helps to have the equipment. But the other banquet speakers at CUE that night were learning-handicapped kids who'd made an equally remarkable project with an old video camera, a bearded Godzilla puppet, and an aphasic puppeteer. It also helps to have talented and enthusiastic kids in your classroom. But every teacher has such students. Sometimes it just takes the right tool, the right challenge, or the right nod to encourage students to announce themselves as stars.
Hall Davidson is director of education services at PBS station KOCE-TV in Southern California and coordinator of the thirty-five-year-old California Student Media & Multimedia Festival.
Links to software tools mentioned in this article:
mPower: Tom Snyder Productions
SmartSound: Sonic Desktop
Final Cut Pro: Apple
Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Premiere: Adobe
Cleaner: Terran
Toast: Roxio
LaCie CD Burner: LaCie
CD Stomper Pro: Stomp, Inc.
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