AN APPRENTICESHIP-BASED MULTIMEDIA COURSEWARE FOR COMPUTER-GRAPHICS STUDIES PROVIDED ON THE WORLD-WIDE-WEB

Apprenticeship is an educational practice that focuses on students act ively engaged in activities with a variety of supports, or scaffolding . Different kinds of scaffolding are appropriate for different kinds o f activities, and different levels of scaffolding are appropriate for different levels of student knowledge. We have designed and implemente d a system for learning computer graphics, Graphica, which combines a variety of kinds of scaffolding and activities, at different levels: F rom highly-structured and well-supported exercises, to less-structured support appropriate for less-structured leaning activities such as st udying for a quiz or working on a programming assignment. Graphica rel ies heavily on multimedia materials to provide models and appropriate supports for learning computer graphics. We believe that a variety of scaffolding is most appropriate for intermediate level students, who m ay still need the high level of support appropriate for a novice and w ho are learning to use the low level of support appropriate for a more expert leaner. Our formative evaluation results suggest that students do use our system at the different levels, meeting our design hypothe ses. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.