Pivot and Stykz - loads of fun

Two free download programs which provide a wealth of opportunity in the classroom.

I first saw Pivot last week at school where the kids were using it to create scenes about Migration. Most of them chose to do refugee scenes as this was fresh in their mind, even though the teacher reminded them that the percentage of migrants to Australia who come as refugees is less than 7%. The girls are only in grade 6 but they managed to create some pretty amazing scenes in 45 minutes. They have used it before so they were familiar with the workings, but I was enthralled so I went home to download it - only to find that there's no Mac version. Sad face. There is, however, a program called "Stykz" which is like a pared-down Pivot, and has a Mac version. According to the Stykz website the upcoming version will integrate well with Pivot and provide many more features, but the upgrade has been promised for around a year now, so who knows when it will actually happen. The current "release candidate 4" works most of the time but errors do pop up quite often. It's probably not suited to the classroom in its current form.

With both programs, you start with a little stick figure. You can bend him in lots of different ways to find a starting point, then make small adjustments and freeze the frames. I think it needs around 10 frames a second to start looking like movement, so for a 10-second clip you'd need 100 frames. (Some of the kids' animations went for a couple of minutes... I can only imagine how long that took them).

Below is one attempt from the first night I had Stykz:

As you can see, it doesn't take a lot of time to learn the program and get some meaningful results. This animation was created from 75 frames, I sat and did it while I was watching TV. 

There is also the ability to create custom objects, such as the bird above. A lot of the kids made cars, structures for the characters to run up and fall off, and all manner of different things. Using Pivot, you can import .jpg backgrounds which are easy for the kids to create in Paint and provide a well-rounded scene. 

I can see many uses for this in the classroom, for example as above, a response to a big issue such as refugees. You could have the class illustrate scenes from a story, or even create stories from their animations. 

I did have one idea, I don't have much of a basis for this but it's kind of a fledgling thought. Children who are on the Autism Spectrum often cannot read body language, and therefore struggle with many forms of communication with their peers. A program such as this where there are no faces, and no speech, could be a valuable tool in educating these children about what certain gestures and social conventions mean. Just a thought.

Links:

Pivot Stickfigure Animator - PC only. Believe it or not this is the Developer's site. Pretty average-looking.

Stykz - PC, Mac or Linux

Inspiration 8 IE - Use and Ideas

Inspiration 8 IE - a great visual mapping tool that does both mind maps and concept maps. It's really easy to use because of the drag and drop interface. There are enough pictures supplied with the program so that meaningful work can be done without too much program knowledge - excellent for play! When the images get boring it's a very simple copy/paste to get new ones from the internet.

There's a 30-day trial on the Inspiration website so towards the end of term so I might download it and watch the supplied "Learn to use" training videos for ideas to use with a class.

Concept MapsInspiration looks like a great tool for things like family trees and food webs, and could be used as an activity in a literacy program to discuss plot, character and setting. The picture to the left is a concept map.

Greg outlined a great task of giving kids a shopping list, and getting them to group items according to where they are in the supermarket. Even a basic sorting activity could be made more interesting using this software. In a literacy activity you could get the students to sort characters into families, or age groups. 

Mind Maps

These are a similar sort of arrangement actually but with different graphics. I think the main difference is that on a concept map you can interlink, however on the Mind Map example at the right you couldn't link an orange item with a green one.

With a mind map you could use colours consistently, eg green for environmental concerns and whatever other colours the children want to assign. In this way it could easily provide a visual basis for thinking about new topics.The mind map feature would be useful for creating a dichotomous key in Level 4 - even making a classroom "Guess Who" game. I actually think it would be a great tool for creating "Choose Your Own Adventure books" - the students could list the flow of events, create a page for each one and mix up the order in the book.

You could make probability diagrams easily with a mind map. It could also be a way of creating fixtures for sporting tournaments like tennis. It's a pity the Australian Open is in the school holidays because that would be a great relevant topic - unfortunately by the time the children come back to school everyone's over the tennis! For a French LOTE class you could do this during the French Open and even integrate it with tennis skills in PE! All from one mind map.

Classroom Practicalities

One important note from today was not to teach children all the features of software at once - give them a 10-minute overview and then set them free to play. I know I learned far more by playing than I would have by watching someone click around a screen. Everyone's brain is wired differently and different features spark interest at different times. If those sparks aren't kindled then ICT could become an unwelcome chore for children.

The children would be able to come up with tons of uses for this software that I haven't thought of. I'm looking forward to finding out how kids think by watching what they do with the pictures and what connections they make. 

Flexible Communities

Wow, it's pretty rare for me to sit and watch a 16 minute video on the internet but this one was right up my alley. For one thing it involves marine critters, and secondly it has some pretty amazing pictures of a place I'll never see - the mid-ocean ridge several kilometres below the ocean. This video is Mike deGruy talking about his work with the octopus. He's answering a question about something to do with sustainability but his passion is just gripping.