Abstract
Interactive features are increasingly incorporated into digital science animations to make the resources entertaining and facilitate viewers’ perception and comprehension of the target knowledge. Despite the growing interest for interactive animations in science education, science animation research lacks a systematic characterization of interactive animation in relation to the nature of knowledge construed. This paper offers a Science Animation Interactivity Framework (SAIF) to characterize interactive features in science animations from a Systemic Functional Semiotic perspective based on an examination of the interactive animations in Scootle, the online repository of digital education resources endorsed by the Australian government and aligned to the Australian curriculum. The framework outlined in this study attends to both the interactive and epistemic affordances of interactive animations, further facilitating the conduct of empirical research on animation as a resource for science education.