Can interactivity hurt learning? The British journal "Education 3 to 13" found that emphasizing graphics and interactivity can decrease childrens' retention of story details. Twenty six-year-olds used a program that read them a story. Half used a version that simply read the story aloud as text appeared on the screen. The other half used an interactive version where children clicked on illustrations that triggered some 300 animations, only two-thirds of which were relevant to the story. A day later, 90 percent of the reading-only group could recall the story. Only 30 percent of the interactive-version could. The researchers suggested that the graphics and interactivity interfered with childrens' ability to remember the essence of the story. Read it here.

Students of Alex Repenning and Clayton Lewis at UC Boulder have put up 16 variations on the Frogger game using AgentSheets as the development platform. One of them is described this way: "Colorful Tonka trucks, horrific death screams when run over, and very bad artwork." Due to the screams, this one is not to be played during conference calls. Click here to go to the web site - click on "gorp", then on "frogger".