How to make courseware for schools interesting: new metaphors in educational multimedia

Abstract

Educational CD-ROMs should be not less interesting and attractive for children than numerous computer games. The approach offered by the authors allows one to reduce the existing gap between educational and game CD-ROMs. This is achieved due to a new spatial metaphor for the user interface and by using an effective multimedia courseware design method. The main idea of this metaphor for an educational multimedia environment is for the computer screen not being a representation of a page of a book, but "a window on to a new world". Because of the complexity and richness of the information model, the development of educational CD-ROMs is then based on the application of scripts for the description of educational material and for navigating information. The design method described in this paper allows one to make the development of multimedia both cost- and time-effective. The approach presented can be used for creating a new generation of "3D" educational multimedia CD-ROMs.