Kotaro Matsushita, Hayato Nishida, Shingo Furuya, Kenneth J. Mackin, Hideo Suzuki, Eiji Nunohiro Tokyo University of Information Sciences, 4-1 Onaridai, Wakaba-ku, Chiba 265-8501, Japan [e-mail]

1
Development of Teaching Materials using
3-Dimentional Computer Graphics Animation in
Elementary Education
Kotaro Matsushita, Hayato Nishida, Shingo
Furuya,Kenneth J. Mackin, Hideo Suzuki, Eiji
Nunohiro Tokyo University of Information
Sciences, 4-1 Onaridai, Wakaba-ku, Chiba
265-8501, Japanmatusita_at_rsch.tuis.ac.jp
Previous works
Outline of the research
Background
There are a growing number of elementary schools
and high schools that install personal computers
Generally, elementary schools will have limited
computing environments compared to colleges.
Further, elementary school teachers have many
class hours as well as other duties, so time in
creating new teaching material is often very
limited. Therefore, when introducing CG animation
teaching materials in elementary schools, the
system must be easily installed in standard
computing equipment in elementary schools and the
electronic teaching material must be easily
modified and extended in short periods of time.
CG animation for teaching material using
PowerPoint 1 to create story boards 2, and
Flash 3 to create picture books 2 has been
previously reported. Electronic story boards
using PowerPoint can display still images
sequentially, but do not fully support CG
animation. Further, these are centered on
2-dimensional (2-D) images. Research on fully 3-D
animation teaching material for astronomy 4
using C programming language and Open GL has been
reported. But OpenGL requires specific technical
knowledge and preparation of computing
environment, and thus is difficult to apply
directly in elementary schools.
It is possible to teach many subjects with
Computer Graphics in schools
We developed 3-dimensional CG animation teaching
materials using CG programming language
CG Material is effective for Education in
elementary schools
Development policy
Development environment
Development procedure
PentiumD-2.8GHz, 512MB-RAM PC running Windows XP
for the OS was used for development. POV-Ray 5
was used for developing CG animation. The reasons
for selecting POV-Ray are the following.
CG animation teaching material was developed with
emphasis on the following 3 points.
Consideration of teaching material contents
(1) CG animation material to follow textbook
contents The CG animation teaching material is
aimed at rousing the interest of the students
towards the contents of the textbooks, and to
improve the comprehension of the textbook
contents. (2) CG animation material to run on
standard PC hardware Elementary school computing
hardware specification may be limited compared to
college and other higher education institutes.
(3) CG animation material to be easily
modifiable and extendible Elementary school
teachers often have limited time to spend on
preparing new teaching material.
Creation of draft image

• POV-Ray provides an efficient development
  environment.
• POV-Ray is freeware that is widely used thought
  the world. Since POV-Ray is freeware, the
  software can be installed without financial
  restrictions.
• There are a large number of references and sample
  program resources which can be easily retrieved
  through the Internet.
• The programs can be easily modified and extended
  by beginners.

Creation of CG for each scene
Creation of CG animation
3-dimentional CG animation teaching materials
CG animation
Fig.1 shows an example of a developed teaching
material used in language (Japanese) class for
1st, 2nd, 3rd grade elementary school class and
Fig.2 shows animations of individual scenes. The
story is an original story. The outline of each
scene is described below.
(a) Scene1
(b) Scene2
(f) Scene6
(a) Scene1
(b) Scene2
(c) Scene3
(d) Scene4
(e) Scene5
Fig.1 Language (Japanese) teaching material.
(c) Scene3
(1) Scene 1 A young crow feels the moonlight and
looks up towards the sky. The young crow decides
to look for a place where the beautiful moon can
be seen well. (2) Scene 2 The young crow meets a
raccoon. The raccoon tells the crow that the moon
can be seen well from a tall mountain. (3) Scene
3 The young crow meets a lost squirrel on the way
to the mountain. The crow helps to find the lost
squirrels home from the sky. (4) Scene 4 The
young crow next meets a sly fox. The young crow
asks the fox for directions to the mountain, not
knowing that the fox was a trickster. The fox
lies to the young crow and gives false
directions. (5) Scene 5 The young crow becomes
lost and flies anxiously. A kind owl shows the
crow the exit of the forest. (6) Scene 6 Upon
arriving home, the young crow realizes that the
beautiful moon can be best seen from the top of
the tallest tree in the very forest he lives in.
(d) Scene4
(e) Scene5
(f) Scene6
Fig.2 Animations of individual scenes.
POV-Ray scene file
Conclusions
References
Developers must create program source code that
the object and background definitions and control
section are clearly separated so that users can
easily find and modify the necessary sections of
the source code. (Fig.3)

• When using CG animation as teaching material, the
  contents can be modified and extended by changing
  only the necessary parts of the program source
  code, most often sections which describe the
  motion or rotation of objects.
• Installing the developed teaching material and
  making the required modification and extensions
  to the program source code of the teaching
  material to match the needs for individual school
  classrooms is the realistic approach.

1G.J.Coulthard, P.R.Graves, S.E.Hutchinson-Cliff
ord (2003). Microsoft PowerPoint 2003,
McGraw-Hill. 2K.Shintani, A.Inoue, M.Hirano,
A.Ueda, S.Kaneda, Y.Miyata (2004). Practice
of PBL using information technology in early
childhood education, Proceedings of the 3rd
Forum on Information Technology, pp.355-356
(in Japanese) 3K.Mouri, M.Suzuki, T.Yasuda,
S.Yokoi (2002). Production and Practical Use
of Teaching Materials based on 3-dimensional
Computer-graphics Technology with Collaboration
in Education of Astronomy, The Journal of
Information and Systems in Education ,
Vol.1, No.1, pp.3513-3516. 4Joey Lott (2006).
Flash 8 Cookbook, O'Reilly. 5http//www.povray.o
rg/
Fig.3 POV-Ray scene file.
The 19th annual conference of the Society for
Information Technology and Teacher
Education 2008.3.3-7 (Las Vegas, Nevada, USA)