Fifth graders at Varina Elementary have been reviewing potential and kinetic energy (SOL4.2), so today, students in Ms. Primrose’s class created animations to illustrate these concepts. For this lesson, we used a different way to animate that I learned about from a fellow ITRT, Michael Price. He showed me how to create an auto-playing animation with Google slides. First, we reviewed potential and kinetic energy and brainstormed several examples (pulling back on a bow and arrow, squatting before a dive or a basketball throw, twisting a rubber band, squashing a spring, blowing up a balloon before releasing it, etc). I explained that we would be animating both the potential and kinetic energy of an action, so the students needed to choose one they found interesting. Next, we opened a blank Google slide, and clicked the Background button. The students used the built-in Google image search to look for a background that would fit their action. Then we added Shapes to make our characters and objects. We copied the slide (right click > Duplicate slide), and moved the shapes around slightly to make it look like the characters and objects were moving. We continued copying slides and making adjustments until our animations were complete. Now it was time to add the animation magic! We clicked File > Publish to the web and chose “Auto advance slides every second.” We also clicked the two boxes so that it would start automatically and repeat when it was finished. When the link appeared, we changed the number that came after “delayms=” to 100 to speed up the animation. You can see their final projects here.
