Week 5 - Animate to Educate

In recent years animation has become a buzzword in educational circles and as a result of software developments in schools more and more teachers are getting the chance to explore the educational value of the animation process. According to 'The Educational Forum' in the UK, animation has a whole range of cross-curricular benefits including the exploration and development of ideas (The Arts), the ability to generate and communicate ideas (ICT), the development of storylines and characters (English), etc. According to the Senior Minister for State Education in China, meanwhile, 'the educational value of animation...lies not only in its stimulation of the creative instinct in pupils, but also in its encouragement of the team spirit', this ties in with the Interpersonal Development domain in VELS.

In this week's final Technology workshop we looked at a number of programs and websites that can be used to unleash the educational potential of animation in our own classrooms. I thought that the Build Your Wild Self and Reasonably Clever websites were a really good starting point for discussions about character creation and development. I particularly enjoyed using the Build Your Wild Self site and I think students of all age groups would find this an interesting exercise and a good stimulus for writing activities in English or Integrated Studies.

The Zimmer Twins website, meanwhile, could be used to teach students how to storyboard their ideas and how this process links to the creation of the final animation. There were some limitations in terms of the type of actions or ideas that you could include in the animation, but it would be a fun starter activity that could lead on to a more detailed and open ended exercise on storyboarding ideas.


While the Dfilm site was inappropriate for primary students, I did think that the structure of the Moviemaker program linked in nicely with the need to think about all the different elements of an animation such as setting the scene, choosing the characters, establishing the plot and creating dialogue. During the workshop I used the site to create the following animation on stranger danger so perhaps it could be used as a teacher tool if you where careful about the scene, characters and plot that you picked.

Finally, given the importance of linking students' learning to life beyond the classroom I think that looking at interviews with professional animators would also be really beneficial. On the Rollermache website for example there are interviews with Darcy Prendergast and Marisa about how they went about creating their clay animations. On this website there are also tips and activities for each stage in the animation process: Get Rolling, Story Telling, Storyboarding, Character Development, Props & Set, Animating, Editing and Sound. It is easy to see how you could develop a whole unit of work based on this site.