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
