Kids have a blast making movies. It is a fun, playful exercise with technology - a nice extra in the educational landscape.
Wrong!
For this generation, making media is a basic literacy. If you are below 12 years of age, the crazy technology on tablets and in our pockets is not technology. It is infrastructure.
Fortunately, educators don't need to look at this type of education as a "nice extra".
It is a core multi-disciplinary, life-skills-based powerhouse of a process!
The list below was created by teachers after we created an original animated short film with them using construction paper, markers, and scissors.
We asked them to list the topics, concepts and skills they felt were relevant to their project.
This is their list in no particular order:
1. Writing
2. Drafting and Re-writing
3. Brainstorming
4. Sequencing
5. Ratios and Sizing Experiments
6. Using inventive word play with idioms, puns, and slang
7. Engineering and rigging props for functionality
8. Math (stop motion projects are big math story problems!)
9. Spatial and Manipulative Intelligence
10. Composition of Scenes and Framing Camera Positions (Cinematography)
11. Editing Video and Sound
12. Voice acting and Sound FX design
13. Improvisation
14. Hypothesizing/Estimating/Predicting
15. Interfacing with Technology and Apps
16. Creative Problem Solving
17. Team work
18. Negotiation
19. Compromise
20. Deadline management
21. Exhibition On Screens
22. Oral Presentation
23. Drawing/Sculpting/Posing
24. Non-verbal communication
25. Scoring and music application
26. Genre Identification
27. Critical Media Discernment Emerges
28. Organization/Filing/Categorizing
29. Leadership
30. Theme and Subject Matter Development
31. Timing and pacing of a performance
32. Choreography
33. Cooperation
34. Lighting
35. Color design
36. Continuity skills
37. Pre-visualization
38. Trial and Error in a safe space
39. Tinkering
40. Small Group Dynamic Experience
41. Character Design
42. Real-time hypothesis testing
43. Decoding Motion Dynamics
We could go on.
This is why we are passionate about stop motion animation education for kids. It involves almost all the skills kids go to school to learn.
One of the youngsters we were helping a few years ago was half way into making a film, paused and said, "Hey, wait a minute, you are teaching me math aren't you?"
We plead guilty as charged.
Hopefully you can surprise your young learners too.
Google "stop motion apps" and get your devices loaded up. Animating Kids recipes are app and device independent.
