Developing Educational Computer Animation Based on Human Personality Types

Computer animation in the past decade has become one of the most noticeable features of technology-based learning environments. By its definition, it refers to simulated motion pictures showing movement of drawn objects, and is often defined as the art in movement. Its educational application known as educational computer animation is considered to be one of the most elegant ways for preparing materials for teaching, and its importance in assisting learners to process, understand and remember information efficiently has vastly grown since the advent of powerful graphics-oriented computers era. Based on theories and facts of psychology, colour science, computer animation, geometric modelling and technical aesthetics, this study intends to establish an inter-disciplinary area of research towards a greater educational effectiveness. With today’s high educational demands as well as the lack of time provided for certain courses, classical educational methods have shown deficiencies in keeping up with the drastic changes observed in the digital era. Generally speaking, without taking into account various significant factors as, for instance, gender, age, level of interest and memory level, educational animations may turn out to be insufficient for learners or fail to meet their needs. Though, we have noticed that the applications of animation for education have been given only inadequate attention, and students’ personality types of temperaments (sanguine, choleric, melancholic, phlegmatic, etc.) have never been taken into account. We suggest there is an interesting relationship here, and propose essential factors in creating educational animations based on students’ personality types. Particularly, we study how information in computer animation may be presented in a more preferable way based on font types and their families, colours and colour schemes, emphasizing texts, shapes of characters designed by planar quadratic Bernstein-Bézier curves. The study has found out that both choleric-melancholic and phlegmatic-sanguine gained the lowest and the highest percentages in selection of different colour groups as cool, warm, and achromatic. We have experimentally confirmed the theory of Nabiyev & Ziatdinov (2014) which reports that planar quadratic Bernstein-Bézier curves with monotonic curvature function may be not aesthetic. Finally, based on the survey results, we have clarified how school students understand the fundamental principles of computer animation. We look forward that this study is likely to have wide benefits in the field of education. Developing educational materials with the aid of obtained empirical results, while considering the personality types of students’ temperament, seems to be a promising avenue to improve, enrich and deepen the learning process in order to achieve its maximum effectiveness.