XO Connection

Our plan

The kids at my daughter's third through fifth grade STEM (Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics) Magnet Public School were given laptops to use (at school) for a full school year. This has its benefits — the students learn how to use basic office applications — but it also has its downsides. Parents and teachers tend to be protective of the students' use of laptops, worried about the amount of inappropriate content on the internet, and so programs in school tend to avoid open use of the 'net and open exploration of the possibilities the computer can offer to students. The lack of creative use of the available technology also means that students don't learn how to work together using the new computers, causing a rather stagnant program. I decided to get involved in my daughter's school by using the incredible technology available to the students for a creative, collaborative project: a digital film club! I approached the school and convinced them to allow me to start a program that would bring students together to make a movie. It turns out there was a moviemaking contest, the Georgia Movie Academy, that one of the teachers wanted to enter, and so we decided to use the club as a way to allow the students to produce an entry.

What we did

We got the kids started creating their film — we outlined a plot, helped the students choose a central theme, and helped the students decide on movie-making teams. Once we had a story, the adults helped worked out the technical details. We taught the kids how to use face-morphing software, scratch animation, and stop-motion technology to produce claymation (like Wallace and Gromit). The kids learned that you couldn't just do something once and expect to master it (we talked about the rule of three in software engineering — by the third time you build something you'll understand what you are building). Our movie took MUCH more work than we had originally planned but all of the kids arrived an hour or more early for school, over a period of multiple weeks, to participate in our club and get the work done. By the end of the movie-making process, the kids were starting to shoot new scenes themselves without any adult guidance, and more importantly, were resolving their own team's dynamic conflicts.