Lego Superheroes App

If you or children in your class recently picked up some of the free Lego sets in national newspapers, then they could be put to good  ICT use.

To accompany the new Superhero range of minifigs and bricks, Lego has created a movie making app.Last week I have set some groups of  children in my class the task of working on creating mini animated movies using a box of  themed Lego and the free app.So far one group has produced the following film, which they are quite pleased with and I will add others as they are made. The app is bundled with all you need to create a film. It has themed music, effects and title cards. It can export to camera roll for sharing and I guess further editing in Imovie. There is a collection of videos on the Lego Movie Making site, which is worth showing your class before your set them off, in order to set the bar as high as you can.

Thoughts on an increasing Move to Mobile  Apps from “Network based Applications”

For many ICT coordinators that I came across both as an advisor and at 2Simple, planning was often an immutable set of documents. You knew who was doing what and with what, perhaps during project or creative week a year group would bring in toys and combine them with clay to create animation scenes. The ICT room would be cleared and the dusty Digi Blue cameras would be plugged into the PCs in order for the animation project to begin. Lets face it those Digi- Blues did not work so well unless they were static like this!  Throw  in some cardboard boxes for scenary, some patience and by the end of the day the movie reels were in the can.

The next session /day would involve Windows Movie Maker for editing, combining and adding a soundtrack and some titles pages.

You may not of course have used this software or approach it may have been 2Animate or the feature packed I Can Animate or any number of free solutions for the PC. But the idea still applies.

This is all still very worthwhile and though a bit clumsy at times it does work very well. My point is this the advent of apps and mobile means we can be a lot more flexible in terms of both space and how we animate. As apps are being released all the time teachers could (in theory) give children a far wider choice of how they animate. Once they have reviewed and decided upon which apps they will have at their disposal. Cost is also a factor here as 0.69 for a single user is far less a commitment than £39 or even £299. You have scope to make a wrong choice or make things available just for a time.

More on this in the year ahead.

 

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