School students to conduct Wollongong’s first ever animation film night
5 Dec 2007 | Bernie Goldie
For the past three years, Associate Professor Garry Hoban from UOW’s Faculty of Education has been developing a new form of animation that enables school children or university students to create their own animations of science or maths concepts.
It is a simplified form of claymation that he calls “Slowmation” which is an abbreviation of “Slow Motion Animation”. In essence, models are constructed flat on the floor rather than standing up, and a huge range of materials can be used with digital still photos taken of manual movements of the models which are then uploaded into a computer program to create the animation.
Importantly, animations are played at a speed of two frames a second (not 25 frames a second as in normal animation) because the purpose is to show an educational concept in slow motion. In 2006, Slowmation won two international “technology leadership awards” presented by the International Society for Technology and Teacher Education and this year Professor Hoban was awarded a $240,000 Australian Research Council Discovery Grant to build a web site like YouTube to display these animations nationally and internationally.
During this year Coniston Public School has been involved in a whole school research project to incorporate the Slowmation teaching approach in every classroom in the school from kindergarten to Year 6.
The children have made a range of animations about different subjects such as Maths, Science English and Human Society and its Environment.
And tonight (Wednesday 5 December from 6pm-7.30pm), Coniston Public School will conduct an “Animation Film Night” for each class to show their creative movies to the parents and community. It will be a fun night with the children dressing up, explaining the educational value of their animations and, of course, selling pop corn.
Coniston Public will be the first school in the world to be involved in such a whole school educational project.
For further information about the film night contact Trent Whittaker at Coniston Public School on (02) 4229 1117.
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