Technolandy

Day 134 (of 2024/25) An Hour of Animation

From time to time I like it when I can do a ‘classroom takeover’ and push off my pvp duties to later in the day. Also nice to provide support to our teacher team in an area a student advocated for… wanting to do some animation… so I got to dust off some skills and creat an addition to my “Hour of…” series 

Film,

Puzzles,

Code,  

Now Animation. And I am kicking it old school! Breaking out an early animation demo that came from Appleworks – a precursor to the tools of PowerPoint and Keynote. When a colleague accidentally discovered that when exporting slides, you could set the transition from one to the other to a fraction of a second… suddenly we could do animations without anything fancy… and it still works, so today I did a classroom takeover to show this strategy to a cohort of our in-person learners.

The fun part is that the “Hour of…” series is not meant to just take an hour… it is intended to be an hour of time invested into a particular theme to see if way too many hours are going to follow in this particular trend. For coding, it was to show how many different ways there are to gain a coding mindset; for puzzles it was providing hands on activities to explore zones of frustration. For film to go from nothing to something in the space of an hour.

I also acknowledge that we will get into zones of frustration because it takes rigor, practice, mistakes and editing to get better and better at this…

So for animation, we look at some of the origins and then how we can use tools we already have (no new app) to help create 2D creations…