Meta-Mentoring

Thursday, September 18, 2008

Digital Animation: Start them young ?

You must have heard of the following (in no particular order and by no means exhaustive):

W.OW., FPS, MMORPG, Ragnarok (ca. 2006), online casual games, Wii games, etc.

Mostly they involve digital learners as consumers. Now wouldn't it be nice if involvement were in the form of "gamers-as-producers"? Machinima or Spore comes to mind (No intention to provoke debate between religion and science with the latter).

But great things come from small beginnings. So why not consider starting with stick figures?

Pivot Stickfigure Animator come could in handy.

"Pivot Stickfigure Animator is a unique software, that allows you to create stick figure animations easily and without any artistic skills. You can move the sections of the sick figure and easily create a chain of animation frames that can be previewed as you go. You can use more than one stick-figure in the animation, and even create your own stick figures using an easy to use visual editor that lets you assemble objects out of lines and circles. In addition, you can optionally set animation size, speed and more. The result can be saved as animated GIF file. Fun and easy to use, surprisingly well featured."

Take a look at this sample. You might need to click on the figure to see it move. I hope it's good enough for a young learner's first crack at animation.

Labels: Animation, Digital Arts, Gaming, software

Sunday, September 7, 2008

Want your child to be a pilot? Perhaps Wii can help

Now I'm beginning to sympathize with Jason Rybca's point.

He says:

"Someone told me once that a child that plays video games more often would have a better chance at becoming a successful pilot than someone who seldom picked up a controller. I'm not too sure how much truth there is to that statement, but it would make sense to me, as piloting a large aircraft is much like playing a video game simulator."