4th Grade Force & Motion Animations
Fourth graders at Laburnum Elementary have been learning about force and motion in Science (SOL4.2). Today, students in Ms. Wolinski’s class created animations to illustrate these concepts. In the past, we have used ABCYa! Animate for animation projects, but today we used a more advanced tool called Wick. I like Wick because you can move each individual part of your drawing, so it makes the process of creating an animation a lot easier. First, we acted out different types of force, motion, and energy, including kinetic and potential energy, to get ideas for our projects. Potential energy is a difficult concept to understand, so we explored examples like pulling back on a bowstring, taking a deep breath before blowing up a balloon, raising a hammer, pressing your fingers together in preparation to snap, pulling your arm back to throw a ball, etc. For each example, we thought of ways to increase the potential energy–pulling back further or pressing harder or lifting higher. Now that we had some ideas, we launched the Wick editor. I demonstrated how to illustrate the first frame of their animation using the paint tools. Then I showed them how to duplicate the frame and move different parts of the drawing in small increments on each subsequent frame. If there is too drastic of a change in the position of the objects, the animation looks jarring instead of smooth. The students continued duplicating and manipulating their frames until they had an animation that illustrated force and motion. Our animations were a bit too fast though, so I explained how to slow them down by going to the Project Settings (the gear icon in the top right corner) and changing the frame rate. Finally, we clicked File > Export Animated GIF and uploaded our finished animations to Schoology. You can see some student samples here. UPDATE: I taught a similar lesson with Ms. Stevens’ class using another animation app, Brush Ninja, and added those to the project page.