Interactive Animation
Higher educational institutes worldwide are increasingly interested in improving student engagement by incorporating innovative and engaging teaching tools and resources. Science education delivered solely by lecturing is less effective and a leading cause of students losing interest in science at the undergraduate level. Animated videos are a successful pedagogical tool for explaining concepts and engaging students by combining audio messages with dynamic graphics. However, creating an animated video, explaining the topic of interest, with the target audience in mind can be extremely challenging for educators. Most animated videos freely available on YouTube focus on explaining popular science topics for school-aged children. There were few, if any animations explaining oral biology concepts for undergraduate-level students.
To solve this problem, we have used the built-in animations of PowerPoint to animate the images and supporting text. Screen-capture software was used to record the animation screen as a video with a voice-over narration.
Figure: A. One of the PowerPoint slides was used to create the animated video. The animation plane is shown on the right (green rectangle). B. Screenshots from the completed animation developed for the School of Dentistry students, University of Alberta.