Running head: MULTIMEDIA CRITIQUE #3 1

Multimedia Critique #3: The Magic School Bus: Ancient Egypt

Leesa Parker

Coastal Carolina University

EDIT 720
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Multimedia Critique #3: The Magic School Bus: Ancient Egypt

The Magic School Bus (MSB) activity focuses on archaeology only on the subtopic of

ancient Egypt. It is a Scholastic.com site and is listed under games, but is not meant to be a game

per se. The lesson on Ancient Egypt is listed as “Science News: Let’s Take a Closer Look,”

which also has numerous other topics that include weather, dinosaurs, and photosynthesis. The

objective of this particular multimedia is to teach students what an Egyptology is and how

mummies were made. The site is suited for elementary students, but the reading level and the

vocabulary of this particular module seemed high for 5th grade. The site was created to make

complex topics easily accessible through informative animations with a familiar character (Ms.

Frizzle) from the Magic School Bus. There are three sections on an illustrated television in which

one watches the lesson. Each “channel” is part of the activity. The first is called the factivity. This

is where the student will participate in the interactive activity about mummies. The second

channel is labeled as The Facts where the lesson and learning objectives are supposed to be

taught to the students. The third channel, Beyond the Facts, provides the learner with outside

links for further research on the topics featured in the Science News. This is the basic set up for

all of the topics in this section of the MSB’s Science News: Let’s Take a Look. In addition to the

learning and the interactive activity, there is an eight-question quiz that students can take to

review what they have learned. This is a free website, however, it requires Flash Player, so it is

not available to play on Apple products such as iPads. Does the Science News follow the

research for effective multimedia learning?

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Figure 1: Set-up of “Science News: Ancient Egypt”

There is no pre-learning in for this activity, so it would be up to the teacher to pretrain the

students who have no schema of how mummies were made. If not, the factivity section would be

a 50/50 guess (as one of the distracters is a silly answer). There is heavy vocabulary, and students

must know specific tools and processes of mummy making for them to be correct. If they are

incorrect, they are given information that is presented to them as partly explanatory feedback,

which would be best for novice learners (Johnson & Priest, 2014). But most of the information

when they get it wrong is that it is in the wrong order, so that may be considered corrective

feedback, which is less effective (Johnson & Priest, 2014). They do get the opportunity to go

back to guess again. Students also get the explanatory feedback if they get the correct answer on

a guess, meaning they receive new learning that may reinforce their long-term memory. The

problem in that is that if students are guessing, they are not using any cognitive pieces to answer

the question, so the process is not fully being fulfilled. If they have the prerequisite knowledge

needed to reduce cognitive load (Mayer & Moreno, 2010), then perhaps the extra information is

something that would reinforce their long-term memory. It should be noted that there is no
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explanation of definition of many of the definitions within the lesson, so if students have no prior

knowledge, the cognitive-load may be burdened (Mayer & Moreno, 2010).

Figure 2 A correct answer to a question.

Figure 3: An incorrect answer and its corrective feedback.

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According to the modality principle, animation and narration is more optimal than

animation and text (Mayer & Moreno, 2010). This site does not provide any narration.

extraneous cognitive load. This may increase cognitive load for the slides that have unfamiliar

vocabulary. Students may struggle know or read or sound out such difficult words. Having a

narrator would not only teach students the correct vocabulary, but also the correct

pronunciations. There is very little sound to this activity. Most of the sounds are Ms. Frizzle’s

positive reward exclamation, “That’s right!” when a question is answered correctly or a “doink”

noise when it is answered incorrectly. There are no other distracting background sounds, music,

or sound effects in this particular video during the animation, which adheres to the coherence

principle. When the process of creating a mummy is completed, Ms. Frizzle leads students to an

interview with an Egyptologist.

Figure 4:The Facts provides learning and is segmented.

During The Facts animation, Ms. Frizzle interviews this Egyptologist. The animation is

similar as is the modality of this channel. There is very little sound in this section either. This
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section of the MSB activity is segmented, so it does allow students to pause and review any

information they may need repeating. This offers the learner some control which may allow them

to manage the intrinsic cognitive load (Mayer & Moreno, 2010), giving them a chance to pause

and digest the information they were given. This is crucial because of the vocabulary the

Egyptologist explains during the interview. None of the vocabulary he covers relates to the

mummy activity. When students are done learning about ancient Egypt, they are looped back to

the mummy activity again.

The last two features of the site deserve little mention. Beyond the Facts is a list of dead

links to further reading or activities. Some of the sites work, but must be typed in by hand. This

may prove difficult for young children. Some of the sites are dated and difficult to navigate, and

to do not adhere well to multimedia principles of learning. Finally, there is a Pop-Quiz section

where students can take a quiz. Unfortunately, some of the questions are not in the information

that the Science News provides if a student didn’t get an incorrect answer. There is no way to

know how much a student learned from such a quiz.

While the MSB is a highly engaging program for students, this activity section on

Scholastic’s website is lacking proper adherence to the multimedia principles of learning. Most

judgement comes from the assumption of background knowledge the students have on the

subject matter for the activity. When students get an incorrect answer, the feedback should have

more explanation. While the information is also high interest, it seems disconnected and less

organized in a way for students to organize their knowledge. That being said, educators can use

this as a supplemental activity after a read aloud about mummies or watching the corresponding

video of the MSB, but this should not be used as a stand-alone lesson on ancient Egypt or how

mummies were created.

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References

Johnson, C.I., & Priest, H.A., (2014). The feedback principle in multimedia learning. In R. E.

Mayer (Ed.), The Cambridge Handbook of Multimedia Learning. (pp. 449-463). New

York: Cambridge.

Mayer, R.E., & Moreno, R. (2010). Techniques that reduce extraneous cognitive load and

manage intrinsic cognitive load during multimedia learning. In J. L. Plass, R. Moreno, &

R. Brünken (Eds.), Cognitive Load Theory (pp. 131-152). New York: Cambridge.

Scholastic (n.d.). Magic School Bus: Science news, ancient Egypt. [Online game]. Retrieved

from http://www.scholastic.com/magicschoolbus/games/sciencenews/egypt/index.htm