after school computer club at an Inner London Primary school and project
workshops. The project makes use of the computer application Toontalk that makes
available a range of modes and introduces the subject of games within the context of
the math curriculum in ways that offer an interesting challenge to multimodal theory.
I selected the three curriculum subjects, English, Mathematics, and Science as the
focus for the thesis for two reasons. First these subjects epitomise what the
government and others see as the core curriculum subjects (as is emphasised by
recent government policy on literacy and numeracy and the more general drive to
increase education in the sciences). Second these subjects provide the opportunity to
explore the hypothesis that modes feature quite differently in the construction of
school knowledge within different subject areas.
I analyse three illustrative examples of technology mediated learning in this thesis.
The first set of data (discussed in Chapter Four) focuses on a series of English lessons
with a Year 10 class (students aged 14-15 years). The lessons focused on the study of
the Steinbeck novel Of Mice and Men (1937) a set text in the English GCSE
curriculum. The focus of the lessons is on the production of course work that focuses
on the entity character that is central to school English. A series of five (one hour
long) lessons in which the students worked with a CD-ROM from the Steinbeck
series (1996) were video recorded. Information was gathered about the module from
discussions with the teacher. The second set of data (discussed in Chapter Five)
focuses on a series of three after-school game sessions with two year 5 students aged
7-8 years. This data is drawn from the Playground project. Video and audio data on
the three sessions (each one-hour in length) was gathered. During these sessions the
students work together to design and build a game in the computer application
Toontalk. Toontalk is a computer programming application written in a Turing
equivalent ‘language’. The focus of the data and the analysis presented in the chapter
is on the construction of the entities ‘rule’ and ‘bounce’ within the context of the
game. The students’ initial design of the game on paper was photographed. A follow
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