They can use this program for several weeks for group and individual practice. Although the teacher could create the program on his or her own and then bring it into the classroom, the students' learning experience and motivation are greatly enhanced if they are the primary program designers. Elementary Designers Multimedia designing is a natural complement to the development of written language skills in elementary school. Now with HyperStudio, kids can make it multidimensional, with the same kind of branching that would occur in their minds. McAuliffe believes that creating multimedia programs develops higher-level thinking skills in the students as kids start thinking about thinking.
Elementary students can design multimedia programs based on their creative or informational writing.
Effective pairing of multimedia and writing includes time for students to create detailed plans about how to link information and ideas through multimedia, time to gather or create media representations of information, and time to put it together and share with peers and adults. Branching is the process used to link information allowing students to access information in the order that is most meaningful to them. For example, the learner may stop a presentation to receive detailed information about a particular term or process and then resume the program. However, the student designer of the program must plan for this need by gathering and organizing the additional information. For a multimedia user, branching allows control of the learning so that new information can be mentally linked to similar information.