Often when we talk about our work, we talk in terms of ‘what’ we did. The Showing My Work series of posts aim to also capture the ‘how’ something was done.

E-Learning Heroes Challenge #71 – Teaching Math Concepts with E-Learning. The brief: This week your challenge is to design a short lesson to teach one or more math concepts. The inspiration for my demo came from one of the source material examples that David provided, where teachers are using LEGO bricks to teach kids fractions. I also went to their website to check it out further.

My idea was to re-create this method for learning about fractions in an eLearning piece for this challenge. After playing around with some ideas on paper, I came up with a three screen demo: Introduction > Visual Explanation > Try it Out.

Here’s a behind-the-scenes look at how I did each screen.

Screen One: Introduction

I like to have a brief intro to my demos and most of my challenge entries have one. Originally, I had a LEGO character and some LEGO pieces (I created the pieces using shapes – circles and rectangles – along with some shadow) flying onto the screen but it wasn’t quite what I wanted as I felt it was a bit dull. As I’m using LEGO as the teaching method for this demo, the LEGO Movie was in the back of my mind and I thought it would be cool to make the pieces come alive and enter onto the screen. I created a basic ‘animation’ using multiple copies of the images and the timeline. Here’s what the Slide View for this screen looks like:

Each image has been duplicated five times and I used the timeline to display an each image from each group one after the other (less than 1 second for each image). Here’s a section of the timeline that shows what I mean:

So when you look at the intro screen, it looks like the same image is moving from off-screen onto the screen. I deliberately wanted the objects to change position as they move in and I think the effect looks pretty good.

Screen Two: Visual Explanation

Next, I wanted to explain the concept of fractions and to do this I used an 8-stud LEGO brick because it can be divided into 1/2, 1/4 and 1/8 pieces. On this screen I showed the whole followed by the fractions and then how the fractions add up to the whole. For this, I used the timeline to introduce the pieces individually and show their relationships with one another. Here’s part of the timeline:

Screen Three: Try it Out

This is where the learner gets to have a go. I used the 8-stud brick and the learner needs to select from a group of bricks the one that would cover half of it. A layer shows depending on the brick they select and gives feedback on their choice. Learners can also have another go if they select incorrectly or repeat if they want to try it again. My original idea was to have lots of bricks and have different combinations that would cover half e.g. 1 + 3 and 2 + 1 + 1 etc. but I found it became too complex with all the different combos and keeping track of the selections. I tried using number variables but it didn’t work like I wanted to so I abandoned the idea.

If this was a longer course, I would have included more ‘trying out’ as well as other fractions – 1/3 and 1/5 as well as more try it out screens.

I was also reminded of the importance of clearly labelling all objects in Storyline projects especially when you have a lot of them, it makes it easier to keep track of everything!

Anyway, here’s my demo, you can click on the image to view it:

Let me know what you think and you can see all of my ELH Challenge entries on My Portfolio page.