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GCSE ICT COURSEWORK: DTP PROBLEM

IDENTIFICATION OF PROBLEM

My school has two open days in October to let parents and primary schoolpupils see around the school to see if they want to come here. As theparents walk around the school they are able to pick up booklets abouteach of the subjects in the school. My task is to produce a booklet forthe science department that will tell parents what we do in science andpromote the school. Mrs Jackson, the head of the science department,will be the ‘user’ of the booklet I produce. She has to be happy that itis good enough to be given to parents during the open days.

I could produce this booklet using a word processor like MS Word97 as itwould let me type in the required information and add some photosshowing what happens in science lessons. However, I think it will bebetter to use a desktop publishing package like MS Publisher98. Thiswill also let me type in the information and add photos, but it willalso give me much more control over the layout and make it easier to putthe text into columns.

It would be possible to produce a booklet manually by typing the textand then pasting it onto a page with the photographs. The trouble withthis is that it would not look professional and it is difficult tocorrect mistakes.

My objectives for this booklet are as follows:

• to make a booklet that is good enough for the open days• to include clear photographs of some science lessons• to include graphs or charts from an experiment• to make the booklet attractive, interesting and easy to understand.

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ANALYSIS OF PROBLEM

To produce the booklet I will need to use the following hardware andsoftware:

HardwareHewlett Packard flat bed scanner - to scan into the computer thephotographs of science labs provided by Mrs Jackson.

Casio digital camera - to take photos of some science lessons in action.

Epson laser printer - to produce the finished printed booklet.

SoftwareMS Publisher98 - DTP package I will use to produce the booklet.

Adobe Photoshop - Graphics package I will use to get the scanned imagesand digital photos ready for use in my booklet. Some of the picturesmay need to be cropped - to show only the parts needed. Some may alsoneed to be made lighter or darker to make them look ok when they areprinted out.

My booklet will be made up of 4 A5 pages. It will be printed on a pieceof landscape A4 paper folded in half, printed on both sides. To get thepages in the right order pages 4 and 1 will be printed on one side andpages 2 and 3 on the other. Each page will contain two columns and amixture of text and pictures. MS Publisher will let the text flowbetween frames. This means that I shouldn’t lose any of the text that Itype in. I won’t bother with headers and footers as I don’t think thebooklet is big enough for these to be important.

I will get the information needed for the booklet about the sciencedepartment and how science is taught in the school from Mrs Jackson, whois the head of the science department. She already has a ‘departmentalhandbook’ that is used by the other science teachers that will tell memost of what I need to know. I will probably have to type in all thisinformation myself as Mrs Jackson is not sure where her other documentwas saved.

Mrs Jackson also has some photos of the science labs that I will be ableto scan into the booklet. I will also use a digital camera to take somephotos of one of our science lessons in action which will make thebooklet less boring to look at.

I also want to show a graph that I produced in science last year. Ithink this will give the booklet a more professional look and show thatwe use computers a lot in science.

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A professional booklet will have to look good and not contain anymistakes. I will use the spellchecker in MS Publisher to spot anyspelling mistakes and will proof read the text to spot any mistakes inmy English. I could get someone else to do this too, in case I misssomething. MS Publisher does not have a ‘print preview’ button so thelayout and the pictures will be checked to see that they are clearenough on the first printout. If they are not I will have to usePhotoshop to make them lighter or darker.

My final booklet will be printed using the school’s Epson laser printer.This will produce a good quality printout and that can then bephotocopied to give us the number of copies needed for the open days. Itwould be nice to produce the booklet in colour, but the school doesn’thave a colour printer so I can’t do this.

DESIGN OF SOLUTION

This is the design for the booklet I showed Mrs Jackson. I had plannedto produce a series of designs to give her a choice, but she was happywith this one so there was no point.

Mrs Jackson said:

“4 pages was just right - room for lots of information, but not too muchfor parents to read.”

“The booklet has the information in the right order - key stage 3, keystage 4 and then 6th form.”

“All of the pages have some pictures except the back page - perhaps thiscould be changed.”

“I look forward to seeing your finished booklet.”

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IMPLEMENT

The following pages show three versions of the science departmentbooklet I produced.

Version 1: My first attempt at the booklet. All text was spell checkedand proof read. Annotation shows changes needed.

Version 2: Shows result of first set of improvements. Annotation showsfinal changes needed.

Version 3: Shows result of second set of improvements. My final versionwhich was shown to Mrs Jackson.

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EVALUATION

I think I have been very successful in solving my DTP problem. I haveproduced a professional looking booklet that will be used during ourschool open days next October.

In my ‘Identify’ section I said my objectives for the booklet were:

1. to make a booklet that is good enough for the open days.I have achieved this. Mrs Jackson says that they will use my booklet forthe open days.

2. to include clear photographs of some science lessonsI have achieved this. The digital camera was easy to use and it was easyto get the pictures into the booklet. I included two photos of our year10 science lessons. I didn’t use as many photos as I originally planned,because they didn’t look clear enough if they were too small and theyseemed a bit repetitive.

3. to include graphs or charts from an experimentI couldn’t find the graph I produced last year and decided that it wouldhave taken up too much space anyway.

4. to make the booklet attractive, interesting and easy to understand.I have achieved this. See Mrs Jackson’s comments below.

Mrs Jackson’s (Head of Science at the School) comments

“The booklet is just what we needed. It is attractively presented, welllaid out and contains all the information I requested. I will be morethan happy to use it for our open days.”

“The Science Events box was a good idea, but this will of course, needupdating each year.”

“It might be worth searching for some more science clipart. In thebooklet biology always seems to be represented by a microscope!”

I am very pleased with Mrs Jackson’s comments. She is right about theevents box needing to be updated each year, but then so will the list ofstaff when someone leaves and it is probably good that it gets updatedeach year anyway. I will have to look at some other clip art disks oruse the internet to find other pictures to replace some of themicroscopes. I think it would be a good idea to use the digital camerato take photos of some of the science events and include them in nextyear’s booklet. A copy of this booklet could also be put onto the schoolweb-site so that parents can get the information that way too.