This research is a development and experimental research premised on the 4D model. A compact video lesson was developed for Lower Six students at LearnAdlib College in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. An introductory video was developed in Adobe Premiere 2022 using presets and background sounds obtained from the internet. Main content of the lesson was recorded using Zoom. Adobe Animate was then used to develop the user interface and to integrate all parts of the lesson. Interactivity was enabled through the use of ActionScript programming language in Adobe Animate 2022. Buttons were developed to enable the student to navigate the lesson from the introduction till the end. The main aim of the lesson was to introduce Visual Basic programming through both theory and a practical activity. Videos to explain the basic concepts and to demonstrate the practical activity were developed and deployed to student machines so that they run the lesson in the browser. A Lower Six class of 28 students was split into two, the experimental class and the control class. Ten (10) multiple choice questions and one practical exercise were used to test student understanding for both the experimental group and the control group. Three Computer Science teachers evaluated the compact lesson’s suitability to the level of learning of the students. They also commented on validity of lesson content in relation to the requirements of the Zimbabwean Advanced Level Computer Science Syllabus 6023. The outcome of the experimental research showed that students who used the online compact lesson managed to answer questions and to produce scores as high as those of the control group. The compact online lesson was therefore as effective as the physical lesson. It had the merit that students could replay some of the areas when doing the practical, each replaying as many times as he or she wants until he or she gets the steps correctly. Thus in an interactive video lesson the student can control the pace of learning while in a face to face lesson the teacher will have to determine pace. That was very convenient for the students and that made them enjoy the lesson. However, they could not ask questions on the go in times when they would have needed to: the advantage which was enjoyed by those in the control group. Students in the face to face class can ask the teacher some questions any time during the course of the lesson.