Multimedia Science Fair Project

This project entailed working in a group (online across the country) and coming up with a science project, planning and executing it, and presenting the entire project in 7 slides. The 7 slides were predetermined: Introduction, Question, Hypothesis, Materials, Procedure, Results, Conclusion. The slides were created in a multimedia program (PowerPoint, Kidpix, etc.), each page saved as a .gif file and then a little program called Microsoft GIF animator was used to put them together into an automatic slide show. It wasn’t difficult to do and the end result was great.

The task/project our group worked on was chosen with a sense of humor – I totally understand that it would not be appropriate for use in a school environment. I was actually surprised by the results – I never expected the experiment to have the results it did.

Multimedia Science Fair

I loved this project. It was really fun. At first I didn’t have any ideas for a science project. I checked out the ccsd.net/sciencefair site to see what we were headed for. Then I looked through many science fair ideas online and pretty soon I started to think of ones we could do. I posted a list of six suggestions to the discussion board. I was hoping that the others would come up with some ideas also but they went with my suggestions so I picked one that I thought we could easily do over the timeframe and would be fun. I was hoping for more discussion group interaction – I read all the other discussion groups to see how they were all making out. It was interesting. I’m always surprised by how much people cannot follow directions. It’s fascinating to observe and I can really see when working with students how you have to go over the directions, parameters, requirements, rubrics, etc. over and over again if you expect to get any kind of consistency in project delivery. Especially for something like this where you want the final results to be similar in appearance.

Creating the slides was fun. I installed Kidpix and luckily somebody at work told me about the hidden menu at the top. I played around with it and made the 7 slides. I could have used PowerPoint but I really wanted to use a tool that I thought kids would be using in a similar project. KidPix would only let me save them as JPGs so then I had to convert them to GIFs – I used PaintShopPro to do that. I located and downloaded Microsoft’s GIF Animator. What a cool little program! I had a great time with it and couldn’t believe how easy it was to put it together, preview it, adjust the times, and save it. I can’t wait to share this idea with other teachers. I hadn’t thought to animate GIFs for content pages like that – it’s a great idea that could be applied to many other projects. This one works particularly well because you have 7 fixed pages.

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