First graders at Holladay Elementary have been learning about force and motion, specifically how pushing and pulling can change the motion of an object (SOL1.2c). Today, students in Ms. Wimmer’s class used Wick to create animations showing a push or a pull. First, we discussed and demonstrated different types of pushes and pulls that first graders would be familiar with: kicking a ball, opening a door, fishing, swinging, jumping, running, etc. Next we went to Wick, and the students discovered something I never knew about Wick. (By the way, that’s one thing I absolutely love about teaching technology–the students often teach me things). They showed me that you could click on the letters on the homepage and different animations occur! After that awesome discovery, we launched the editor, and I explained how to use the paint brush tools. In the first frame they painted a picture of someone pushing or pulling something. We clicked the Clone Frame button to make a copy of the image, and I showed them how to group the objects together and drag them with the arrow tool. We continued making copies and moving the objects until we had about five frames. When we clicked “Run,” the students were thrilled to see their animations play out. Since the animations were a little fast, we clicked the Settings gear in the top right and changed the frame rate to 5. Finally, we exported our animations as GIF files (File > Export Animated GIF) and uploaded them to Lino (an online bulletin board similar to Padlet). You can see them all here.
