[MWForum]turning teachers on to MW - the graphics are great!

[Ray Catzel]

Are you aware that MicroWorlds EX has a feature to fill in transparent
areas?
----ray

-----Original Message-----
From: mwforum-admin@lists.mathcats.com
[mailto:mwforum-admin@lists.mathcats.com]On Behalf Of Wendy Petti
Sent: Thursday, February 26, 2004 1:41 AM
To: mwforum@lists.mathcats.com
Subject: [MWForum]turning teachers on to MW - the graphics are great!


Hi Folks,

Recently on this list, Tony Wilson was asking about an easy way to use MW to
run an automatic slideshow.  He mentioned during that dialogue, "I am trying
to push Microworlds amongst the staff and if it is too much of a bother they
will want to use a media player or powerpoint.  I am hoping the kids can see
the value and power of programming."

I think many of us have found ourselves in that same situation.  We might be
the lone MicroWorlds enthusiast on staff or we might be one of a small core
group of MW enthusiasts, and we might be looking for ways to get more
teachers excited about and comfortable with MicroWorlds even if they have no
background or interest in programming.  It's one thing to teach our students
some programming, but I never got anywhere with trying to teach programming
to my colleagues.

But I did find many ways to promote the use of MicroWorlds by less
tech-savvy teachers, even though they continued to need some hand-holding
and encouragement.  I'll share a few ideas here, more later, and I hope some
of you will share ideas that have been well-received at your schools.

The focus in this message is on the graphics capabilities of MicroWorlds.

At my former school, we had a very limited set of software installed on our
computers:  MicroWorlds 2.0_ and Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint,
Access - which we steered clear of for the most part) and also MSWorks.  And
then of course there were the programs that come with Windows, such as Paint
and Internet Explorer. (I hated Paint and much preferred the graphics
capabilities of MicroWorlds.)

I became a huge fan of using MicroWorlds for all of our graphics needs, and
I continue to use MicroWorlds for generating all of the graphics on my Math
Cats website.  In 3 1/2 years of developing that site, I have felt little or
no need to shell out $$ for a more advanced graphics application.

We've already seen how MW can easily be used to assemble an automatic
slideshow of external JPEG or GIF files (as well as other graphics formats).
Here's how I often use MW to create and edit artwork:

Let's say I'm drawing a new cat for Math Cats.  I use the circle/oval tool
to make the basic head shape, then erase a bit and add ears.  Next I draw
one eye.  I want the other eye to be a mirror image of the first, so I
surround the first eye and copy and paste it into a shape.  I open that
shape and use the mirror image button to reverse the eye, then I surround
that eye with the selection tool and copy it.  I close that shape and paste
the selected area into the cat's head.  (I've used this partial mirror-image
technique in lots of Math Cats projects, such as the Symmetrical Butterflies
craft project:  http://www.mathcats.com/crafts/symbutterflies.html.)

I often use the fat bits editor (I click and drag with the selection tool
then double-click inside the selected area) to get an enlarged view which I
can edit pixel by pixel.  I love that I can select the desired magnification
with MW Pro.  I copy and paste my finished cat into a shape, then I open the
shape and click and drag its boundaries to crop the image closely so that I
don't have any unnecessary white space around it.  (This works much better
in MW Pro than in MW 2.0_, for we can easily select any shape dimensions
with Pro but cannot fine-tune the dimensions as much with MW 2.0_.)

(I love storing graphics in the shapes center.  Often I make multiple copies
of a newly-drawn shape and then edit them to get variations - arms and legs
in different positions; merging one graphic with another; etc.)

Next I use the SAVESHAPE command (in the command center) to save my new
shape as an external GIF file (or if I've cropped a photo or combined a
photo with a cartoon-like drawing, I might save it as a JPEG file).
Example:

saveshape "orangecat.gif 17

where 17 is the number of the shape I'm saving as an external file.

Now one thing to bear in mind is that a white background in a shape is
transparent when used within a MicroWorlds project, but it appears as solid
white when used outside MicroWorlds.  If I want a transparent background for
this external graphics file, I need to use another application to do this.
(I used to use the drawing tools of Word to make one color transparent; I
would import the graphics file, use the transparency tool to make one color
transparent, then save the Word document as a web page, and in
newly-generated folder accompanying the web page I would find two files, one
of which was the new graphics file I needed with the transparent
background.)  But it is much easier to use the free Irfanview graphics
viewing-editing application (www.irfanview.com) to make a transparent color;
read on "transparency" in the help index to find out how.

All of the graphics for Math Cats' Polygon Playground
(www.mathcats.com/explore/polygons.html) and Tessellation Town
(www.mathcats.com/explore/tessellationtown.html) were created with MWPro
(with the help of another application for making transparent backgrounds).
I combined MW Logo programming with the graphics tools to generate all of
the colored polygon outlines.  It is very easy to create tessellating puzzle
pieces with MicroWorlds, when you copy and paste wiggly lines to form
matching pairs on both sides of an altered quadrilateral (for instance).  My
students used to love creating tessellations with MicroWorlds.  I used the
rotation tool in the shapes editor to create right-side-up and upside-down
triangle people.  (Of course, first I created the original equilateral
triangles with Logo commands.)  To make very precise tessellating ocean
waves I used MW Logo programming to draw the original curves and then I used
the graphics tools to color the wave puzzle pieces and the coordinating fish
puzzle pieces.

For an example of a graphic combining a photo with a cartoon-like drawing
and using a transparent background, see my self-portrait at
www.mathcats.com/grownupcats.html.  I used the graphics tools of MWPro to
erase the background of the photo, first outlining carefully around my head
(first with a white fine line tool or eraser and then with the fatter lines
and with white rectangles).  Then I put my head into a MicroWorlds shape,
opened the shape and chose a good magnification, and drew a little cat
perched on my shoulder.  I saved this as a GIF image and then used Irfanview
to make the white background transparent.  It was fun and easy to create
this composite image using MWPro.

My students used to love drawing cartoon bodies under their photo heads and
then animating their bodies to dance or leap or do jumping jacks or
whatever.  You can see examples in the "Animate Me" folder at the
MicroWorlds in Action site:
http://mia.openworldlearning.org/animate_me/animate_me.htm
They enjoyed importing each other's cartoon-body images and using these
characters in multimedia stories which they wrote using MicroWorlds
textboxes.  Even first-graders could do this, if we didn't worry about
writing procedures to create animations.  The "Animated Story" MIA folder
demonstrates how even stationary characters can be used to make textboxes
appear or to navigate to different project pages:
http://mia.openworldlearning.org/animated_story/animated_story.htm

We used to use the graphics capabilities of MW combined with textboxes to
create many multimedia social studies projects.  It was nice sometimes to
incorporate some programmed animations, but if we are trying to get more
teachers comfortable with using MicroWorlds, we can encourage them to
combine static graphics and text as a first step.

I also created an "empty book" project which already had empty textboxes and
navigation arrows and plenty of pages already set up (another version
generated pages automatically as needed, complete with new textboxes and
programmed navigation arrows).  It had a title page; the student just needed
to type the title and author in the preformatted textboxes. It also had a
planning page where students could list their characters, make note of any
references, do some brainstorming, etc.

I much preferred using MW for creating multimedia projects in this way
rather than PowerPoint or HyperStudio, because this way we could keep the
focus on generating meaningful content.  With PowerPoint or HyperStudio,
students begin to get too distracted by the formatting decisions before
they've developed their content.  With MicroWorlds, it is easy to start with
a bare-bones text box and then gradually add the bells and whistles after
the text is written.

I will try to locate this empty book project and a few other useful template
projects and share them soon with this list.

I hope you'll find some of these ideas useful... and if you've managed to
read to the end of this message, I congratulate you heartily!

Wendy Petti
MicroWorlds in Action
http://mia.openworldlearning.org
Math Cats
http://www.mathcats.com






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