Interactive textbooks generate big data through student reading participation, including animations, question sets, and auto-graded homework. Animations are multi-step, dynamic visuals with text captions. By dividing new content into smaller chunks of information, student engagement is expected to be high, which aligns with tenets of cognitive load theory. Specifically, students’ clicks are recorded and measure usage, completion, and view time per step and for entire animations. Animation usage data from an interactive textbook for a chemical engineering course in Material and Energy Balances accounts for 60,000 animation views across 140+ unique animations. Data collected across five cohorts between 2016 and 2020 used various metrics to capture animation usage including watch and re-watch rates as well as the length of animation views. Variations in view rate and time were examined across content, parsed by book chapter, and five animation characterizations (Concept, Derivation, Figures and Plots, Physical World, and Spreadsheets). Important findings include: 1) Animation views were at or above 100% for all chapters and cohorts, 2) Median view time varies from 22 s (2-step) to 59 s (6-step) - a reasonable attention span for students and cognitive load, 3) Median view time for animations characterized as Derivation was the longest (40 s) compared to Physical World animations, which resulted in the shortest time (20 s).
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Gemini 2 : Generating Keyframe-Oriented Animated Transitions Between Statistical Graphics
Complex animated transitions may be easier to understand when divided into separate, consecutive stages. However, effective staging requires careful attention to both animation semantics and timing parameters. We present Gemini^2, a system for creating staged animations from a sequence of chart keyframes. Given only a start state and an end state, Gemini^2 can automatically recommend intermediate keyframes for designers to consider. The Gemini^2 recommendation engine leverages Gemini, our prior work, and GraphScape to itemize the given complex change into semantic edit operations and to recombine operations into stages with a guided order for clearly conveying the semantics. To evaluate Gemini^2's recommendations, we conducted a human-subject study in which participants ranked recommended animations from both Gemini^2 and Gemini. We find that Gemini^2's animation recommendation ranking is well aligned with subjects' preferences, and Gemini^2 can recommend favorable animations that Gemini cannot support.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1907399
- PAR ID:
- 10355037
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- IEEE Visualization Conference (VIS)
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 201 to 205
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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