This is Part 2 of a series of blog posts. If you haven’t already, read Part 1 here!
In February our group facilitated a series of remote workshops in collaboration with the ideaLab team at the Denver Public Library. This was our first attempt designing for a family learning experience that kept the traditional Family Creative Learning spirit of joy, playfulness and a focus on relationships, over Zoom. To read more about how we thought about translating the goals of FCL into online workshops click here. In total we designed four workshops, two in English and two in Spanish, based around the theme “Make it Move.” This theme was inspired by work of the Tinkering Studio team at the Exploratorium and the Lifelong Kindergarten group at MIT, who we were both collaborating with on a new “Facilitating Computational Tinkering” project. Within this theme we explored making two frame stop motion animations that showed everyday objects coming to life as well as importing pictures of an object to Scratch to begin to build a story. This blog post details our Stop Motion Workshop design.
STOP MOTION WORKSHOP
The first set of workshops utilized the stop motion app “IMGPlay” and an object of participants chose to create a two-frame animation gif. It was more challenging than we initially expected to find an app that we felt was easy for families to pick up quickly. Our original goal was to offer a platform that was available via both desktop and mobile for accessibility but no such free platform met our goals. We landed on IMGPlay which offers a handy “shadow” feature in the app to show how your object has changed from frame to frame. It also includes an easy way to share your project via email in the app, enabling participants to send their projects to a facilitator for later sharing. In future iterations of this workshop we would also offer the option to share the file via text as we found that not all participants had an email account set up on their phone.
Family’s Spaces As Studios
As part of our introduction activity we asked families to go on a scavenger hunt around their space to find an object that they wanted to bring to life, this was in line with our goal of helping families see their spaces as studios which we talk more about in a blog post here. We then all introduced ourselves by turning our Zoom mics on and showing our object to the camera and explaining our stop-motion idea.
Facilitators Walking Through an Example
Facilitator walking through an example. Faces shown are all part of our facilitation team.
After this a facilitator would show the material they chose to work with and walk through screenshots showing how they created a gif in the IMGPlay app. We tried to show a wide range of examples so that participants didn’t feel limited by not having specific materials handy. We also walked through various ways to create a stand for your phone using household items to ensure better stop-motion results.
From there, participants were encouraged to work with their cameras on. Facilitators would call on families occasionally to ask about their progress or answer any questions. When our making time was complete, participants emailed their completed gifs to one facilitator who was in charge of uploading them to a Padlet in order to share everyone’s projects in the last few minutes of the hour long workshop.
Sharing Out Projects
While screen sharing the Padlet, a facilitator would call on a participants name and ask them to tell us more about their process, what they enjoyed, what was challenging etc. Many of the young people in the workshop were excited to share their gifs, with some being able to create more than one in the 20 minutes of making time.
FUTURE GOALS
We hope that future workshops will continue to explore activities that allow families to use familiar objects in new ways in combination with technology. We are exploring the potential of creating kits that families can pick up at Denver Public Library branch locations before the workshops. We are also thinking through ways that we can better facilitate families getting to know each other during workshops through collaborative projects or by better utilizing the Zoom break out room feature. We are excited to see how we can continue to reach families with programming that is exciting and relevant to them in the future and can transition into in person workshop settings as DPL IdeaLAB’s spaces hopefully open up in the fall.
To learn more about specific design considerations we made for facilitating a workshop on Zoom, while trying to maintain the spirit of a typical FCL workshop that would be held in person, read Part 1 of our blog series here. Or read Part 3 of this blog series about our other workshop activity, “Make it Move: Scratch” here.
This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 2005764 and 190835.