Reflection on the Final Assignment

Thanks to all for giving us so much positive feedbacks to improve our work!

We have found that the comments from our coursemates were mostly centered on the interface of “Let's play a song”. Perhaps the idea of playing song is too dominant in this learning object, most people seem to be sidetracked by it which is not our desire. In order to make the balance between the educational message and entertainment, we tried to minimize gimmicks in the interface of “Let's play a song” as far as we could, and emphasized on “learning” in this learning object.

Besides, as suggested by Daniel, a single interface acts as one access point to most information was regarded as the best design in learning objects , we had actually taken the risk not to use one single interface as we planned to do at the very beginning of the formation of this idea. However, one single interface in our case was not easy to achieve. We did our best to design the two similar layouts for the two interfaces instead. The two different interfaces take different roles. We found that the design of the both interfaces looks consistent, harmony and unity.

Regarding Chris' suggestions on diverse ways to taking the experiment, we had considered more alternative ways for students to produce sound with different pitch, such as blowing the glass tube or hitting the glass tube. The two different methods would actually produce sounds with opposite pitch. As a result, we kept the method we used to.

We had made efforts to produce the sound ourselves to make the LO authentic. We had difficulties to produce pitches with great difference. The glass tube was not long enough. We went back to the school laboratory but there was only a long plastic tube which did not produce sound properly. Because of the limited time and the hard work with using Macromedia Flash to work on the modifications; we accepted the pitches with slight difference only in the end.

Nevertheless Macromedia Flash was really difficult for us. We had tried our best to design and draw using the software to accomplish this task. With the idea of Daniel’s demo and technical support from a friend of ours, eventually we have got it! Thanks, Daniel!