Inspiring Scratch Project!

As rats are my favorite animals, I just had to type "rats" into the search function to see what Scratch had to offer in the way of rodents. I was delighted to find a rat maker and dress-up game by LiljatupsuLilytuft. Not only can you change the rat's coloring, fur pattern, ears, eyes, and tail, but you can also dress it up in a cute, warm winter outfit. What's not to like? I used to love dress-up games when I was a kid, so I was excited to learn that I could make my own on Scratch.

Reading Takeaways

Image Credit: Olga Tutunaru on Unsplash

Invent to Learn: Making, Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom by Sylvia Libow Martinez & Gary S. Stager
Growing up, I always felt I learned better when I got to do something with my hands. I think this is true for most people, but hands-on and experiential learning is not always applied in the classroom, despite what philosophers speculated and research has supported. I think this is one reason art class can be an escape for some students: they finally get the chance to try something themselves rather than just listen to a lecture or read about it. Art lessons can become especially interesting when students get the opportunity to engage with a technology that feels new or unfamiliar to them. The process of feeling and trial and error promotes problem-solving, creativity, and deeper understanding in learners and is self-rewarding. When you combine Papert’s “Constructionism” with Dewey’s ideas of reflection and meaning-making, you open the possibility for students to learn not just the technology but also about themselves, other subjects/topics, and the world around them; in fact, encouraging meaning-making and reflection helps the practical or technical skills students learned to stick with them.

Frame-by-Frame Stop Motion: The Guide to Non-Puppet Photographic Animation Techniques
Prior to reading this, I had no understanding of where stop-motion originated. It makes so much sense that stop motion evolved from early filmmakers and creatives like Georges Méliès, who experimented with practical effects. The animation lesson plan I made last week combined sound composition with stop-motion animation. Now I can imagine more ways stop-motion animation (which is way more broad than I realized with different forms such as: puppet animation, pixilation, time-lapse photography, and downshooting or cutout animation) can be combined with other materials and practices, like filmmaking, to create something unique that opens students up to a larger range of creative possibilities for self-expression.

Stop Motion Animation

Connoisseur Caterpillar

Sound effects sourced from Pixabay:

freesound_community, “042276_AMB_celery-chewing-01.wav”;

freesound_community, “3_tone_chime”;

Roman_Sol, “Magical Transformation SFX (Short).”

This week was kind of crazy, and I think this claymation reflects that. Over the weekend, much of the Art and Art Ed dept at TC, including myself, attended Conversations Across Cultures, a one-credit required symposium. During the workshops, we focused on developing and understanding our artistic processes through embodied explorations involving ourselves and different materials, much like Judy Burton's Processes and Structures course! The experience was so involved that it permeated into my assignment for New Media New Forms, becoming the background material for my claymation. 

I struggled to come up with an idea or concept for my stop motion. "Serious play", abstract lines and shapes, and sensory exploration are all that my drained brain could think of. Well, that, and... worms, for some reason (maybe I'm longing for spring). I thought back to the stop motions I've made in the past. In middle school, I used to make stop motions with my dolls. I recall enjoying experimenting with their movements and frame rates to create something smooth and realistic. In high school, I took an animation class, where our final assignment was to create a claymation. I remember again being focused on the movement of the objects and having a lot of fun making something silly with clay. Thus, my green clay worm, caterpillar thing was born. I'm a little too embarrassed to share my middle school stop motions, but this is my claymation from high school:

Where Does Your Food Come From?

It had been years since I made a stop motion, and I can't remember which programs I used, so I decided to try the free Stop Motion Studio App. I also used my iPhone camera, a small tripod, and CapCut to edit everything together. I don't have photos of my work set up, but I did make some test claymations to experiment with the background materials and how to move my little worm guy. Below are just two of them!

Test 1:

Test 2:

Overall, I really loved this process, and I wish I had had more time to work on it. I think stop motion is ripe with possibilities for the classroom! Not only is it wonderful on its own, but it also pairs well with sound composition experimentation and material exploration. It is the perfect bridge between digital, physical, and audio-visual!

Making Connections

Sound art has a lot of classroom potential! Not only is it obscure enough to trigger students’ interest, but it also opens them up to experimental forms they might never have encountered, challenging traditional Western understandings of music. It also encourages slowing down and deep listening in our fast-paced, screen-centered lives. Students get to learn the basics of audio recording and editing software while incorporating their lived experiences, cultures, and environments through field recordings. Additionally, sound art could be more accessible to some students, as it can be independent or collaborative, offers an alternative sensory experience to visual and text-based media, provides an outlet for processing emotions, and supports identity exploration. Lastly, sound art connects with interdisciplinary fields such as science and technology.

Digital Collage similarly has a lot of classroom potential. Many youth are interested in learning to use programs such as Photoshop, Illustrator, Procreate, or GIMP, and digital collage is a great way to learn the basics. Students can also bring their lived experiences and interests into the process by using their own photography, digital drawings, and materials they find online and offline, encouraging identity exploration. With digital collage, students do not have to print out materials and can easily undo mistakes once they get the hang of their chosen program. Being able to undo mistakes, remix, and make changes might encourage some students to take risks, further developing visual literacy. Lastly, digital collage can spark discussions about copyright, fair use, etc., important information to understand.

Video

Video as a media process feels very intimidating to me. I don't typically post on social media, and I don't enjoy being filmed, so my experience with it is very limited. It was also difficult to find a YouTube video I felt comfortable recreating, since most of the content I consume features someone who is fully visible on camera. I originally planned to make a short informational video about a few minerals in my rock collection, but couldn't find a good reference, so I turned to my friends for help! Here's what one of them sent me:

TikTok by @_ratatuje0.

View here: https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZThb6cQ9x/

This is the video I ended up picking for my inspiration. I cannot resist a silly rat video, and neither can my friends, so Ikea rat dancing to Electric Zoo from SpongeBob it is! Besides, I have a few of the same rat plushies, so it was perfect! My first idea for recreating the original video was to add another dancing rat each time the music repeated. However, after downloading the video, I realized how short it was. The music loops about every 3 seconds and repeats 3 times, creating about 10 seconds of rodent screen time. My video needed to be 30 seconds, so I realized I would need to loop the music 9-10 times. Knowing that, I made a list of what the rat plushies would do during each loop to create a little narrative. Then I leaned my camera on a box, tied fishing line to all my characters, and began filming. Afterwards, I edited my videos in CapCut and added effects to enhance the chaos of the party scene.

Electric Zoo After Dark

Audio source: YouTube video by SpongeBob SquarePants - Topic.

View here: Electric Zoo - YouTube

I would say this project aligned most closely with my second learning objective: expanding my artistic practice and media literacy. Would I call my video creation a fine artistic achievement? Ummm... no. But I tried something new, created something joyful, and learned a bit about CapCut, which is super popular for creating TikTok videos. Incorporating CapCut into art instruction could be a wonderful interest-based learning approach for many students. 

Reading Takeaways

Image credit: Mike Tinnion on Unsplash

Digital Storytelling in the Elementary Classroom. Youtube Video, 5 min. June 13, 2011, Oregon Writing Project at University of Oregon. Access Link

It was awesome to hear from the kids themselves how much they love digital storytelling, and it's clear how much they've learned from the process. Each child was excited, engaged, and seemed to enjoy sharing their new knowledge with the camera. It’s also just impressive that they learned audio and editing skills. I never had any projects like that in elementary or middle school, but I remember being curious about that kind of stuff due to shows like iCarly and the stop-motion videos I used to watch.

TEDx Talk. Emily Bailin, 2014, 17 min: The Power of Digital Storytelling

Emily Bailin’s Ted Talk was powerful, and that’s just the point. I can see the opportunity digital storytelling provides youth to express themselves, explore, share their own experiences and creations, and feel heard. Not only that, but stories are often captivating and effective ways to share information. As a teacher, applying digital storytelling in my lesson plans and the way I convey information might make learning more engaging for students.

Peppler, K. A. (2014). New creativity paradigms: arts learning in the digital age. Intro and Chapter 2.

This reading brought up some conflicting thoughts for me. I love interest-driven learning, but with recent research raising alarm bells about the effects of social media and screen time on youth’s cognitive development, I feel conflicted about how much we should use certain technologies in schools. If youth spend much of their free time on technology, should we increase screen time by introducing it in classrooms? I don’t have the answer, but I suspect it’s somewhere in the middle. It was very interesting to read about how new and developing technologies were viewed in the education sphere in the early 2000s and 2010s, when I was growing up.

[Video] Ableton. (2018, January 9). Katie Gately: How much can you feel?YouTube, 14 min. Access Link

Listening to Katie Gately talk about her music and creative process brought back many memories from my undergrad, when I experimented with soundscapes and acoustic ecology. I grew up learning classical music on the cello and singing in choir, and although I listened to many genres, this was the first time I heard music so experimental. It was exciting and freeing to learn about sound in such a new way. I really think incorporating sound exploration into teaching would be an amazing experience for kids, opening them up to the world of sound editing, potentially unfamiliar music, and simply the act of deeply listening to their surroundings. In Processes and Structures, Judy encourages us to experiment with and get to know both conventional and unconventional materials. Soundscapes feel like the sound version of that.

Scanography

At Home Experimentation

Materials: Plastic stencils, black paper, color-changing lamp

Since I was sick again this week, I decided to do a little practice at home to get the hang of my scanner, as I had never used it before. For these scans, I layered 4 plastic stencils on the scanner bed and moved a color-changing lamp across the scanner's side and top in different ways. For some of the scans, I introduced a black piece of paper, hoping it would help the lamp's colors pop with different settings. That didn't really work out with my scanner, but I still got some interesting results that remind me of sheet music!

Series 1

Materials: Ikea rat plushie, packing tape, my hand

For my homework, I gave up on my lamp and stencils and decided to take a new route with materials that felt more personally meaningful. I have been thinking a lot about my childhood as I study to become an educator. As a kid, I had undiagnosed ADHD and would get very anxious at school. I felt different than the other kids and was bullied for my interests, especially my love of rodents. When I moved in 3rd grade, I decided to suppress parts of my identity in order to fit in, even changing the name I went by for several years. Hence, for series 1, I focused on themes of restriction, anxiety, and control. Through a repetitive constrained gesture, Series 1 explores the emotional pressure of conforming and the tension it creates within students who feel they must hide to be accepted.

Series 2

Materials: cut plastic binder inserts, Ikea rat plushie, my hand

Series 2 is a direct response to Series 1, focusing on self-acceptance, flexibility, and love. The combination of kind gestures between a hand and a stuffed toy, and the soft, colorful layers enveloping them, reflects the importance of empathy, trust, and supportive relationships in both personal growth and educational settings. This process also aligned with my personal learning objectives by expanding my new media toolkit and reinforcing my interest in connecting digital and familiar physical materials. By introducing students to new media, educators can expand opportunities for emotional expression and identity exploration, helping foster a more inclusive and supportive classroom environment.

Bonus!

Dancing rat GIF!