Posts on “ creativity ”

Liz Andrews, Lower School Computer Lab Teacher at Kentucky Country Day School (and new mother) uses BrainPOP as inspiration for creative projects with her students. In 2nd grade, the homeroom teachers lead a yearlong community study, and BrainPOP Jr’s community helper topic page is a hit with the students.  For a few years, Liz would show the movie and have children use KerPoof to make digital drawing of people in the community in response. However, she soon realized the difficulty of drawing humans would be eased if students drew Moby instead (not to mention it was a good incorporation of geometry!) Once the students drew Moby in outline form , they would use the paintbucket tool to fill him in with bright orange! In 3rd grade, to continue developing online drawing skills, Liz leads the “Moby is” project.  Her only only requirement? Draw Moby as someone, and explain who he is.  Since the students are already familiar with KerPoof, this entire project is done in one class period.  Liz gets great insight into her students through this project.   Living in Kentucky, many are caught up in the excitement of regional college basketball so there are a lot of Moby basketball players!  However… Read the Rest»

Have you heard about Scratch? Well if you like BrainPOP, you’ll love Scratch. Scratch is a unique, free programming tool that can be used for game design, storytelling, animation and all sorts of multimedia projects. Based on the constructionist (not to be confused with construtivist) theories of Seymour Papert from the MIT media lab, Scratch is like recess that encourages kids to play and create in virtual space.  Interestingly, Scratch incorporates a social aspect by encouraging programmers to upload  projects to the online community where they can play, comment, download and remix projects by other users.  Currently the community hosts over 2,000,000 projects, thats a lot of remixing!  Here is an interview with Mitch Resnick, Professor of learning at the MIT media lab, talking about tinkering, making and remixing with Scratch. Attention Tri-state area teachers: This weekend, NYC Scratch Day is happening at Packer School in Brooklyn. Kids, teachers, parents and Scratch fanatics from all around will come together to share, learn and program together.  If you register, look out for BrainPOP’s own Allisyn Levy.  Reach out and say hello!