DESIGN OF DIGITAL EDUCATIONAL MATERIALS FOR

PRIMARY EDUCATION

Isabel Cuadrado Gordillo and Inmaculada Fernández Antelo

Department of Psychology and Anthropology, University of Extremadura, Badajoz, Spain

Keywords: Curricular materials, ICTs, educational multimedia.

Abstract: The design of multimedia materials adopted in our proposal is based on a constructivist centred approach in

providing the children with mediated learning experiences that foster the acquisition of strategies and the

self-regulation of their learning process. To this end, we use the figure of a mascot who acts as their guide in

resolving tasks set them in language, mathematics, and environmental knowledge. The guidance is not

limited to telling them that their answer is right or wrong, but attempts to get them to reflect on the

procedures they applied, the mistakes they might have made, the relationships that have to be established

between the different concepts involved in the problem, the cognitive strategies they have to put into effect

to complete the task, etc. This design is wrapped in a series of adventure games matching the centres of

interest shown by children according to their age.

1 INTRODUCTION

This presentation forms part of a Research Project

centred on the design and production of multimedia

educational materials targeted at the content of

Language, Environmental Knowledge, and

Mathematics in Primary Education. The materials

provide a new way to work on these curricular areas

from a threefold perspective – interactivity,

flexibility, and adaptation to the individual needs of

each child. Its design therefore moves away from the

behaviourist approaches and the types of

programmed education that still characterize most

educational software for working on school-level

content. It also moves away from the design

followed in the simulation and microworld programs

proposed by Papert (1981) in not requiring the

pupils to have any prior knowledge of programming

in order to interact with the program, and in

fostering the social aspect of learning through

collaborative activities. For this last objective, the

activities are situated on virtual platforms that enable

simultaneous access for sharing and discussing the

content and how to execute the program. Our

proposal is centred on providing the children with

mediated learning experiences that foster the

acquisition of strategies and the self-regulation of

their learning process.

The design is implemented in a scenario that is

attractive and close to the pupils – a Natural Park, in

this case, Monfragüe. Wrapping the activities in a

series of adventure games matched to the interest

centres shown by children according to their age

allows the pupils on the one hand to get to know the

flora and fauna inhabiting this environment, and on

the other motivates and involves them in their

learning.

2 METHOD

The method followed in preparing and presenting

the tasks for the pupils to do is based on three core

aspects:

• The design of a game for each block of content

in which to insert the activities for the pupils to

do. These games set the children different

challenges, for example, to rescue a princess

from the castle, to prevent fires in a natural

park, to repopulate with trout a river where

animals threatened with extinction feed, etc. In

this way, besides working on certain attitudes

related to coexisting with and respecting nature,

we arouse the pupil's curiosity and interest in

the tasks to be done. To meet these challenges,

the pupils are proposed a variable number of

443

Cuadrado Gordillo I. and Fernández Antelo I. (2008).

DESIGN OF DIGITAL EDUCATIONAL MATERIALS FOR PRIMARY EDUCATION.

In Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies, pages 443-447

DOI: 10.5220/0001513904430447

 SciTePress

tests that will require them to resolve activities

corresponding to material in mathematics,

language, or environmental knowledge (Amory,

2001; Amory, Naicker, Vincent & Adams,

1999).

• Story Construction. The objective is for the

child to imagine existing and potential

relationships between different parts of reality.

It involves the need to connect facts and

situations with objects and their contexts, and

this requires constructing meanings. Stories give

us a better understanding than simple abstract

presentations (Brown, 2007).

The stories that we present are diverse, and we

believe that this is the natural way to construct,

explore, and solve learning tasks. But they

always require a context. The objects and facts

that will make up the stories need to be put into

context, in this case, therefore, by reference to

the Monfragüe Natural Park. Consequently,

describing the context of a Natural Park

involves re-assessing its role in learning (an

essential activity of environmental education).

• The Use of Mascots (a stork, a boy, a forest

warden, a princess), at different levels of

difficulty, as a means of interaction with the

pupil. They also constitute a highly motivating

element, and provide pupils with clues to

reflection when their cognitive processes fail.

Matching these tasks to the pupils' educational needs

led us to include a series of measures targeted at

specific deficiencies or impairments. To deal with

the case of pupils with a hearing disability, all the

activities and hints to help with their resolution

appear in text on the screen. For the case of visually

impaired pupils, besides the activities and hints

being presented as speech, we designed a tool that

allows them to increase the size of the elements that

appear on the screen. Finally, for the case of pupils

with a mental deficiency or a marked lag in

maturing, the same activities can be presented at one

of three different difficulty levels. In this way, a

priori there is the sensation that all the pupils are

working on the same activity, because the statement

of their activity and the photographs, videos, and

characters making up the story on their screens are

the same. However, the resolution of the activity

will in some cases involve more complex cognitive

strategies and greater previous knowledge than in

other cases. Thus, for example, in the area of

mathematics, and specifically in the content block of

addition and subtraction, in Level I the addition

problem requires operations that do not exceed the

tens and requires no application of the concept of

carrying. In Level II, this same problem will be of a

combinatorial type using up to the thousands and

involving carrying. In Level III, as well as the

application of carrying and increasing the units to

the tens or hundreds of thousands, the problem

statement may be put in the form of a comparison,

which requires a greater capacity of understanding

and decoding than the previous cases.

3 GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS

CONCERNING THE DESIGN

OF THE ACTIVITIES

• The activities included in each thematic block

deal firstly with knowledge of a natural

environment and some of the elements to be

found in it, and secondly with a situation

invented to generate in the child the need to

solve the problem or activity. In as much as the

activity arouses the pupils' curiosity and shows

itself to be relevant and useful in fields that are

of interest to them, it will increase their

willingness to take a real part in carrying it out.

• All the activities are based on problem-solving.

The idea is not for the child to learn a set of

formulas or concepts and be able to reproduce

them faithfully, but rather to be able to apply that

knowledge to real specific cases, that are, in so

far as is possible, close to his or her sociocultural

context (Cuadrado & Fernández, 2006). For

example, it does not interest us whether or not

the child knows the classification of the animals

or plants by memory, but that, after the

presentation of some of these elements which are

presumably going to be familiar, he or she

knows how to classify them by observing and

analyzing their characteristics.

• The level of complexity of the activities included

in each level of each block is increased

progressively. I.e., we work on some concept in

the first activities. After the resolution of these,

we assume that this concept has been assimilated

and propose activities that work on a new

concept related to the former one. In this way,

besides progress in the learning process, we try

to establish conceptual relationships between

elements of the content being presented and to

show their continuity. For example, we first

approach addition without carrying, and then

later progress to addition with carrying. Or we

first work on multiplication by a single figure, to

later increase the number of figures and

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progressively introduce the properties of

multiplication.

• At each level, the pupils work with concepts

from the previous level by way of review. In this

way, we facilitate the establishment of cognitive

bridges between what they already know and the

new content.

• The dynamics of solving the different problems

is open to different strategies that the child might

use. I.e., one does not oblige the child to follow a

certain path to do the activity, but makes almost

all the possible ways of solving a problem

available for the child to choose the one that is

best adapted to his or her thinking. This involves

including all the variants consistent with

resolving some given exercise, from the more

pictorial to the more algebraic or abstract, or

from those in which the pupil chooses to first

construct a conceptual map and then to use its

content to solve the task, to those in which the

pupil decides to answer the questions directly.

But in addition, the design of these materials

allows the child to choose even a path that does

not lead to a satisfactory or correct resolution of

the task. Sometimes one needs to make mistakes

to detect which conceptual relationships remain

to be established, what previous knowledge was

wrong or incomplete, etc. Experimentation

fosters the awareness of the steps or procedures

to follow that are best suited to each type of

activity, and this is only achieved by designing

materials that allow a path to be followed that

does not necessarily lead to the correct answer

(Cuadrado & Fernández, 2003).

• Solving the problems or tasks is doubly

motivating. On the one hand, each problem

forms part of the general dynamics of a game (a

different game for each block of content) in

which the child must solve the problem to

continue playing (Amory, 2001). And on the

other, the game represents an accessible

challenge for the pupils, creating in them the

desire to continue to the end to see the result of

their small achievements, such as, for example,

seeing the utility of having created a fire-break

when a fire occurs, saving a princess thanks to

obtaining the ingredients needed to make the

magic potion, etc. Also, the dynamics of the

presentation of each game offers the opportunity

to see, from photos or videos, the components of

the problem. For example, in an activity in

which the question is how many rabbits are

needed to feed the colony of Eurasian black

vultures in Monfragüe, the pupils can access the

photo, the video, or the technical information

page of both the rabbit and the vulture.

• In the mascots' presentation of the activities, the

text on the screen includes words in red. These

are words that we understand may be difficult to

understand at that level. Therefore, clicking on

them or simply hovering the cursor over them

brings up a text box clarifying their meaning.

4 MAIN EDUCATIONAL

CONTRIBUTIONS OF THE

NEW DIGITAL MATERIALS

Apart from the form and external structure

characterizing the design of these activities, the main

educational contribution of these materials is in their

commitment to meaningful learning in the context of

Vygotsky's zone of proximal development. In this

sense, each activity is accompanied by a series of

hints that are activated when the pupil makes a

mistake. Their purpose is to elicit the pupil's

metacognitive awareness by indicating which is the

mistake detected, why it is considered to be a

mistake, and inciting reflection on which strategies

or procedures should be used to correct this error

and finish the task (Teong, 2002). This involves

foreseeing the possible mistakes that the pupils may

make during the activity, and providing for each of

them the relationship of the given information with

the pupils' prior knowledge. In the case of a

successful response also, this type of relationship is

established in order to eliminate the effects of

chance and to explain to the pupil why the given

answer is correct and what part of his or her prior

knowledge is related to it.

Therefore, whether the pupil's response is right

or wrong, the mascot is not limited to saying just

this, or, when called for, to replacing these visual

messages with a variety of sounds and animations

aimed at capturing the child's attention.

Instead, firstly it will guide the learning process

by attempting to get the pupil to fix on the data that

are provided in the problem. To this end, it will

ensure that the pupil has read the problem

comprehensively, and understands what is asked, by

means of a series of questions that vary according to

the data involved.

Secondly, it will check the child's degree of

understanding of a certain concept or item of

curricular content. If the pupil has answered

correctly, the mascot relates the given answer to

other content to explain why this answer is

DESIGN OF DIGITAL EDUCATIONAL MATERIALS FOR PRIMARY EDUCATION

445

considered valid. If the answer was wrong, the

mascot will go back to earlier concepts to check the

child's previous knowledge and then relate that

knowledge to the content and activities now being

presented. Nonetheless, this does not imply

relegating the teacher to a background role or

replacing him or her by a mascot or program

computer. Neither does it imply encouraging the

pupil's solitary learning (Crook, 1998). The design

of these activities strengthens the teacher's role of

guide fostering the pupil's self-regulation of their

learning. The teacher constantly selects, organizes,

orients, adjusts, and graduates the aid that the

children need to overcome the difficulties and

obstacles that they come across. The computer

material is just one more educational medium that

the teacher has available.

Figure 1: Process of the interaction in the correction of

activities.

And thirdly, the pupil is presented with activities of

progressive difficulty specifically aimed at dealing

with the conceptual and procedural errors that he or

she has made previously. With respect to the

concepts, the material covers all the content in the

primary education curriculum, working

simultaneously on aspects of language, mathematics,

and environmental knowledge. For example, the

solution of a geometry problem includes topics

related to the knowledge of certain characteristics of

plants, the popular traditions of a zone, the birth

indices of an animal species, reading

comprehension, spelling, and written expression, as

well as the purely mathematical topics related to

geometry such as quadrilaterals.

With respect to procedures, the activities are

designed to offer the pupil different paths to the

solution. I.e., the task can be completed by applying

a procedure that the pupil knows well, or considers

most suitable or easiest, etc. The guidance given by

the mascot in this sense is directed on the one hand

towards the use of those procedures that best match

the knowledge that the child has been found to have,

and on the other towards the characteristics of the

task. In sum, the mascot's guidance is aimed at the

acquisition of strategic behaviour.

With respect to the block dealing with attitudes,

these are present in all the statements of the

activities, in the design of the games, and in a large

part of the indications given by the mascot,

independently of the area of knowledge that is being

worked on.

5 PROJECTION AND USE OF

THESE MATERIALS ON THE

WEB AND IN THE

CLASSROOM

The reasons making it possible for these digital

multimedia materials to be available for the next

school year in all the classrooms of Extremadura are

many and various:

- The fact of covering most of the primary

education curricular content in the areas of

Language, Mathematics, and Environmental

Knowledge.

- The treatment given to the material, as well as

the psychopædagogical approach underlying it.

- Its flexibility and capacity for adjustment to the

real-time educational needs presented by the

pupils and the school in general (Gértrudix,

Gálvez de la Cuesta, Álvarez & Galisteo del

Valle, 2007).

- Two basic aspects of the current reality of the

technological infrastructure of Extremadura: the

existence in all Extremadura's schools of a

computer for every two pupils, and the

possibility of using an intranet and a set of

virtual platforms capable of allowing the entire

educational community network access to the

material.

- The support and interest of the Board of

Education of the Extremadura Local

Government as materialized in the concession of

a major budgetary allowance for computerization

of the Region's education system.

But the utility and dissemination of this material go

beyond their presence in Extremadura's classrooms.

Open and free access to it on the Web make it

Aids in the correction

of activities

Success

Error

chance?

No Yes

Reinforcement of

the treated concept

General indication that promotes the

reflection of the treated concept

Persists the error?

Yes

Explanation of markers that

demonstrate the contradictions

of the given answer

Persists the error?

The mascot solves to the answer indicating the

markers that help to detect the error

Yes

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possible for teachers all over the world to work with

their pupils in a constructive, interactive, dynamic,

and attractive way on the curricular content that it

covers.

The challenge now is to train the teachers in the

use of digital materials stored and distributed on

digital networks. Nevertheless, according to

statements made by teachers themselves, this

training should not be centred on the acquisition of

technical knowledge, but on the knowledge of the

educational implications and psychopedagogical

foundations deriving from the design and use of the

different digital materials that are available.

Teachers need to identify the skills, abilities, and

strategies fostered by the multimedia materials that

they work with in their classrooms, the difficulties

that their pupils will come across, and the other

educational instruments they will need to use to

overcome the deficiencies or to enhance the

strengths of the digital materials that they work with.

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