Second Progress Report for
the Design Team - 4/4/05

From our previous progress report,
we decided to critique our set of papers on the basis of the six design principles
that seemed to be a theme through out much of the research. As a refresher,
here are the six design principles again:

1) Simplicity

2) Consistency

3) Usefulness

4) Usability

5) Accessibility

6) Coherence

The purpose of this paper is to refine
the research we have found based on these six principles and try to develop
a set of attributes that a good system should have so that it is most effective
on a child's learning. Here is what we have found thus far:

Simplicity

Limit type styles, limit colors,
eliminate superfluous items, keep text lines short, keep simplifying the structure
(Thorson)

Probably the most important aspect
of these attributes when applying them to educational interfaces is keeping
text lines short. It seems like kids hate to read long paragraphs, and the more
concise the text is, the more the concept to be learned is emphasized.

Consistency

Navigation, justified text appropriately,
standardized use of colors (Thorson)

Students should be able to navigate
through an interface with ease and with as little ambiguity as possible.

Usefulness

Limit the focus, know your audience,
use lists (Thorson), addressing student needs (Schank), emotional impact (Schank)

Limiting the focus of a given interface
allows the student to be more engaged in the single idea presented per screen.
Knowing the audience that will be interacting with the interface is important
because their current level of understanding must be assessed. The concept needs
to be challenging, but not so much so that it becomes frustrating for the students.
Using lists helps students find information more easily, and it is a very effective
way of presenting material on a computer screen. Designing a concept that grabs
the emotions of the students is essential for learning.

Usability

Good labeling, spatial contiguity
(Mayer), orienting users, using upper and lower case letters(Thorson)

Using clear labels for things like
buttons and navigation is important for the flow of the system and that the
students remain engaged. Having corresponding words and pictures presented near
rather than far from each other on the page or screen is important for spatial
contiguity. Also important is having closely spaced words and pictures reduce
the need for visual search, reducing working memory load.

Accessibility

Easy access to interface, not too
technologically advanced

Access to the software should be
easy for everyone and there should be no errors due to technology issues.

Coherence

Material that is extraneous to the
learning purpose/goal should be excluded rather than included. Examples are:

- interesting but irrelevant pictures,
sounds and words

- unnecessary text, including explanations
that are longer or more in-depth than necessary

Extraneous materials draw the learner's
attention away from information that is critical for learning and disrupts processes
of encoding, integration and organization.

That is our current status of research
for the independent research project. Once we delve into more sources, we will
obtain a firmer grasp and find more attributes of the above principles.

References

Techtactics - Carolyn Thorson

Multimedia Principles for Design
- Richard Mayer

10 Principles for Good Design - Roger
Schank