Pivot - Stick figure animation for storytelling

One of the very cool things about Kusasa is that I get to visit schools and just hang around and observe. Often I am interested in trying to pin down scenarios where kids share ideas or assist each other to see if we can build similar scenarios into our own material.

What I find particularly interesting though, are the covert activities that kids feel compelled to try hide from their teachers. Surfing the web on the sly, playing games are all pretty common but, sometimes you spot something a little different.

One of these was watching a few boys who very suspiciously attentive and diligent. I managed to manoeuvre myself to see what they were up to and could see three of them developing pretty complex stick figure animation sequences.

Of course these guys were supposed to be doing something else and were pretty adept at flicking back to wikipedia’s soil erosion page when their teacher hovered nearby.

The kids don’t seem to think I am a teacher (my general scruffiness helps I guess) so I hover over and ask what application they are using - Pivot. We chat for a while and the guys show me what they are working on - reworking the whole of Spider Man III in stick figure animation. A pretty daunting task - especially when you are undercover. It seemed the were about halfway through although as they picked new techniques the existing content was upgraded. I could not help but see the appeal of doing this over the dreary task assigned. No doubt they would do poorly on the assessment… but what about the determination and dedication, the attention to detail the constant refinement. “No value there” - oh well…

I tried to gauge how they thought it would go down if they included some stick figure animation in the work they were supposed to be doing - a presentation on soil erosion. They were really not keen. Whether this was because of the likely teacher response as they intimated or because they did not want to pollute they own private “discovery” by exposing it , I could not determine.

Back at the office I did a bit of poking around and found that there is quite a bit of pivot… the coolest one I found was a music video made using pivot for the catchy “7 Nation Army” track by the White Stripes. I posted the link to the guys at Grove -

I can’t help thinking that there is scope for using these kind of tools in ways that appeal to kids and teachers.