of the choice of medium in and of itself, I compare the application with two others,
Logo Imagine, and Pathways. Logo Imagine can be crudely characterised as a writing
system, and Pathways as a visual object orientated system. While in the first part of
the chapter I focus on the potentials of the medium and modal resources of the
programmes, in the second part of the chapter I focus on how two students engaged
with the modal potentials of Toontalk in building a game. Through a detailed
multimodal analysis of the students making their game I look at two students’
construction of the entity ‘bounce’. The analysis centres on the impact of modes
(including still image, gesture, posture, speech, animated movement and writing) on
the emergence of the mathematical concept of ‘bounce’. I show that the modal
resources that the application makes available to the user enables them to realise the
entity ‘bounce’ in quite different ways. The chapter concludes that the choice of
representational modes in the design of a program is central to the engagement of the
user with it.
6. The Multimodal Construction of the School Science Entities
‘states of matter’ and ‘particles’ on Screen
In chapter six I explore how the multimodal resources of the computer screen reshape
the science curriculum entity ‘states of matter’. Throughout the chapter I draw on an
illustrative example of a science lesson with a year seven class in which the CD-
ROM Multimedia Science School (2001) is used to investigate the topic ‘states of
matter’. In particular, I focus on how these resources result in a shift from the
traditional focus on distinct ‘states of matter’ to a new representation of the process of
the transformation from one state of matter to another. Alongside this I examine how
these resources re-mediate the practices of students in the science classroom and their
agency in the production and construction of knowledge. I conclude that the resources
of the screen both reshape the curriculum entities in significant ways and the role of
the students in relation to the learning of science.
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