Pre-Interview
Third and fourth graders were recruited from the after-school program of a local elementary school as participants. The main medium of study was the animated medium or animation, but we concurrently studied the digital print medium as well for control and comparison purposes. The print medium provides a contrasting mode of mainly textual information representation with regards to the mostly visual nature of animation. Results from a pre-interview lasting around half an hour conducted with a group of fourteen children at the school also provided us good confidence in the choice of the control medium. The print (textual) medium and the animated medium were seen to be a significantly different pair (p < 0.005) in a survey of their perceived familiarity with various media including storybooks, cartoons, movies, comics and the internet. Familiarity has been
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described as consisting of five main factors: prior experience, repeated exposure, level of processing, study duration and forgetting rate (Zhang & Ghorbani, 2004). We based our questions about familiarity with the different media on these five factors, and produced a scale with a reliable alpha coefficient of 0.77. The full questionnaire used can be found in Appendix C.
Main Study
Ten children from 3rd or 4th grade, 5 girls and 5 boys, took part in the main study. Eight of
them participated in the pre-interviews and two of them joined in only for the main study. The bulk of the study consisted of asking the children to create stories using the two media. They made use of the ‘Frames’ software to create the animated stories. Frames (Tech4Learning, 2011) is a digital storytelling software that can be downloaded for free as a fully-featured evaluation version on the web. The children created the textual story with the ‘Microsoft PowerPoint’ software, presented as a set of storybook slide templates to them (Figure 1).
Frames makes use of a frame-by-frame approach to allow one to create animations (see Figure 7). Stories can be organized as a series of still frames (like a storyboard with sound). Authors can specify the duration that each frame stays active when the animation is played, and so, can create the illusion of motion by varying the placement of objects in consecutive frames. Objects can be obtained either from a library or can be created using drawing tools. They can be manipulated through rotation, flipping or resizing. Frames has been tested with children in several schools (Tech4Learning, 2011) and is easy to use even for younger children. By controlling the frame transitions, children can then create the effect of ‘stop-motion-animation’ or a slideshow story.
Figure 7. Screenshots of Powerpoint with storybook template (Left) and Frames animation software (Right)
The study was carried out in two sessions over two different days to prevent fatigue of the children from creating two stories in one session. To enable us to study the creative process, they worked in groups of two or three as social interaction motivates externalization of thoughts into speech. The children were grouped subjectively by the site administrator. In the first session, two
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pairs created animated stories and two pairs produced Powerpoint ‘storybooks’. In the second session, two of the participants were not able to take part in the study, resulting in two groups of three children, one using the animation software and the other the Powerpoint software.
Each group worked on a separate computer, and had a voice recorder placed nearby to capture the conversation during the story creation process. The children’s task was to continue and provide an ending to a given stimulus story beginning. Tasks that have been used in previous storytelling creativity studies can be classified as drawings, questions about a story, the use of standardized creativity tests such as the Torrance’s (1967) tests of divergent thinking, and story completions (Valkenburg & Beentjes, 1997), which we used. We wrote two stimulus story beginnings that we ensured satisfied three criteria: that they were appropriate for the developmental age of the children, both in terms of language and content, that they were not close to experiences that only some of the children might has gone through before, and that they were more action- oriented than emotionally-driven. The stories had similar themes and were both around half a page in length with standard formatting, while still being different. The first story beginning related the story of living soap bars who have been placed in the cupboard by a family. One day the protagonist, a blue soap bar, decided to leave the cupboard to see the outside world. His cousin, a green soap bar, wanted to go with him. The second stimulus story introduced a set of Red, Blue, Yellow and Green living colored pencils belonging to a girl named Amy. They live in a box on Amy’s desk. One day, they decided to visit the outer world. The full story beginnings used can be found in Appendix D.
The step-by-step procedures of the study were as follows:
The children were grouped and each given a sticker with an ID code to paste on their shirt.
They were separated into two groups according to the stimulus stories that they had to follow.
Two researchers read out the stimulus stories to each group.
The children were then divided into their working pairs or groups of three. Those creating animations were sent to a different room than those creating the storybooks.
Two researchers, one in each room, explained how to use the software (Powerpoint for the storybook group and Frames for the animation group) to the children. The children were given a print-out of the stimulus story that they had to follow, and asked to continue and end the story.
One researcher remained in each room as an observer and took down notes of behaviors. No formal time limit was imposed for the authoring sessions, but the amount of time that the children had to create the stories was determined by the arrival of their parents. Under these circumstances, the children had about 1.5hrs for the task.
Individual post-interviews were conducted on the next day with each child separately. The children were asked about any problems that they might have had with the software, and to retell their own story.
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Study Model
Figure 8 illustrates our study model. Demographics and familiarity with media were variables that we collected for the purpose of the pre-study. The possible confounds were controlled as described above: content familiarity through the use of the same stimulus stories for all the children, and usability of software through the use of a tested, off-the-shelf software. In the post- interviews, all the children also indicated that they had no problems using the software and did not find it hard to create the animations. We next describe the lower part of the model: methods used and the data analysis done.
Figure 8. Phase I: Study model