Campers Create Animations with Toontastic 3D, Unimator, Daisy the Dinosaur & Animate Me!

This morning campers in the AT&T Classroom explored several new digital animation tools.

Animate Me! iOS is a free app for creating animated photos and videos. Children can pull a photo or image into the app and use the tool’s interface to draw a moveable mouth on the image and then record voice-over to animate the image.

The campers also created animated stories using Toontastic 3D  a free web-based tool for creating digital stories. The Toontastic 3D offers a gallery of characters, templates, and backgrounds that children can use to draw, animate and share 3D stories and animated cartoons.  Children are also able to add audio to their story by recording their own voices.

Campers were also introduced to the Unimator iOS app for creating animations. The tool offers a novel keyboard for creating animated gifs or animations that can be shared online. The app also offers a text-to-speech function allowing the image to “speak” the contents of the text animations. The app also allows for sounds and background music to also be added to the animation.

The campers also learned to code animations using the Daisy the Dinosaur iOS app. Daisy the Dinosaur  introduces children to the basic elements of coding by engaging them in using drag-and-drop steps to animate the dinosaur move, jump, shrink and grow. The app’s challenge mode takes the child through a tutorial to learn to use the drag-and-drop interface to code animation. There is also a free play mode in which children can design their own program to animate Daisy. Providing opportunities for young children to learn to code fosters children’s abilities for mathematical reasoning as well as skills for critical thinking, divergent thinking, creativity, and problem-solving.