Can you imagine?

Little did I know that my post “Have wings, will fly” would turn out to be prophetic. The wings helped inspire a cross-curricular collaboration between 5 year 9 classes to create a spectacular exhibition inspired by VIVID Sydney.

I used the wings as a prop for a friendly challenge of ‘Can you imagine….us having our own version of Vivid?’ very early in the school year.

Not only did we imagine, we made it happen. By we, I don’t mean just the teachers but especially our students and with support from the school community. This was no mean feat and here are just some of what I’m really proud of:

  • 2 9DT teachers and myself wrote our course programs and assessment tasks to suit
  • Going on an after-school excursion and not losing any kid
  • Collaborating with other teachers and members of the school community – we’ve never done anything of this scale
  • Staging an exhibition, including an opening night where we got Vivid designers talk to students (thanks to Joachim Cohen from Intel for helping make this happen).  Harmanto Nguyen- Toy Shadows and Simone Chua – Affinity were awesome and I got to showcase our students work to them, too
  • Having students that are proud to share their work publicly (here’s our YouTube playlist)
  • ultimately, making real that which we imagined

A bit more background info: 9DT-Textiles designed and created garments as well as accessories with soft/textile circuits. 9DT-Rigid materials designed and created light installations for outdoors. 9IST designed and created digital movies/animation using iconic buildings as their canvases. 9PDM captured light photography.

A bit more detailed info on my IST project for those who may want to build on the idea.  This was a PBL on the Digital Media topic, specifically movie and animation. The challenge was to “create an illusion of movement” using frame-by-frame animation. Working in groups to create a movie 2-4 minutes long, each student has to create 30-45 second segments which should include at least 15 seconds of frame-by-frame animation; the rest could be video.

Each group had a tab in the class OneNote where all deliverables were outlined, whether or not they were part of the assessment for reporting. They had to document target audience and purpose, concept maps, storyboards, etc. I created the Project Schedule for the class and gave mini deadlines (activity and time chunking is a good strategy to help manage projects spanning an entire term as well as help identify students who are at risk of non-submission). This shared space facilitated seeing what others are doing and thus, peer feedback, both written and oral. The quality of the end result is testament to the validity of this practice.

There are the obvious option topic outcomes involved in designing, producing and evaluating. This included a variety of data manipulation techniques including the use of layers, masks, garbage matte, transparency adjustments, special effects, etc. There are also core topic outcomes relating to project management, communication techniques, career options and issues.

At the end of the project, I also did a structured review using peer instruction or think/pair/share with answers written in the class oneNote (shared notes, yes?).  Here are the questions we worked through (I had more as we discussed):

  1. Define:
    1. Animation
    2. Frame rate
    3. Morphing
    4. Warping
  2. Was your animation mostly cel-based or path-based? What’s the difference between the two?
  3. What file types were used for your project? What software programs created them? Can read them?
  4. What factors affect the file size of finished movie?
  5. Contrast embed and link?
  6. Define keyframe
  7. Was the storyboard helpful? If so, in what way? If not, why not?
  8. Which communication technique proved most useful for you – verbal, written, graphical and visual? Provide detailed example.
  9. Rate your contribution to the group on a scale of 1 – 5, 1 being ‘meh’ to 5 ‘rock star’. Justify your rating detailing your criteria and detailed example.
  10. What advice would you give to next year’s 9IST if they were to do this project?

I think the structured post-project review was really helpful to assess learning, clarify misconceptions, fill gaps and revise course content using personal experiences. It’s a great way to end a PBL unit.

At the end of this review, I showed this path-based animation created using Scratch and character/costumes drawn by one of my students (check out Group 4). This not only helped compare/contrast cel-based vs path-based, it also served as a relevant segue into the next topic, Software design and programming 🙂

Long post I know but it barely scratches the surface of what this experience has meant to me.

If you have a similar story or feel inspired to initiate a cross-curricular collaboration, please leave a comment or relevant link.