We were recently contacted by the Polaris at Ebert school in Denver, CO who has been using stop-motion animation in their classrooms for a few years, and just last year began using SAM Animation. They spent an incredible amount of time pulling together a video that captures the students in ...

Have you ever wanted your students to try out an idea for an animation without taking pictures? Without the computer? A practice run of sorts? I have had this idea before but I have never tried it with students until this week. I wanted to have them practice using the ...

Melissa and I are at the Science Centre in Singapore doing SAM Animation workshops with staff members and teachers from primary and secondary schools here in Singapore. Yesterday was the first day of sessions, and both Centre staff and teachers made movies of processes and cycles. Here is a movie ...

One of the unique features of SAM Animation is the ability to perform time lapse. While this is not stop-motion in the literal sense, it's a useful feature for students to ask questions and have discussions about changes that occur over long periods of time. Below is a time lapse ...

I had the opportunity to observe 2 senior physics classes using SAM Animation as a modeling tool at Portsmouth High School, NH earlier this week, and it was fascinating to see the students create models that were fundamentally wrong -- but, that's not actually a bad thing...The seniors were just ...

Our very own Brian Gravel sat down with Morgan Hynes, Research Professor at Tufts and pulled together a comprehensive guide to help teachers apply to small grants, and win!Small grants designed specifically for teachers to try new initiatives, gather new materials and resources, or gain access to professional development services ...

Good afternoon, everyone. I wanted to show you something very cool for today's afternoon animation. In spirit of @changeequation's reminder that Engineering Week is coming up (Feb 20-26!), we decided to feature a SAM Animation developed by freshmen students at Tufts University in their Musical Engineering class. Have you ever ...

As a high school science teacher that uses SAM, this is a topic I think about often. When I am designing an activity or even planning to implement an activity that I have done in the past, I ask myself: Should I use props or not? In other words, should ...

As I watched Brian Gravel present to a group of about 20 teachers from Oyster River Middle School in Durham, NH today, it occurred to me that person-to-person, hands-on workshops are becoming more rare, and it's too bad as there really is an indescribable energy to professional development that's interactive, ...

Melissa will be demoing iCreate to Educate, some "greatest hits" animations, and SAM Animation at tonight's Boston Tech Meetup event at the Microsoft Nerd Center. Other companies presenting include: NetBlazr, Blogcastr, Muckrock, Relay Technology, and Abroad 101 ...

If you've spent as much time on YouTube or our website as I have, you can probably recall a stop-motion animation you've seen that looked really good. It was colorful, texturally interesting, and something about the motions really captured your attention. Movies like T-Shirt Wars and Sorry I'm Late are ...

Last week, I was shown an excellent instructional movie created by one of my colleagues here at Littleton High School. I wanted to highlight it to address a question that we often get during our workshops: "How can I use SAM with students when I only have 1 computer in ...

Where is animation particularly effective? Animate things that change: the medium is dynamic, and best suited for showing dynamic processes. Visualizing the unseen: chemical reactions, body systems, celestial motion - interacting with the things humans cannot typically interact with. Modeling complex changes over time: many things change over varying times ...

HUE Animation Studio has been featured in the November 24th 2010 issue of The Sun: The top ten "must have" list of Christmas toys contains the usual predictable suspects of noisy electrical items that will drive us all to mouth-frothing distraction by Boxing Day. So it gives me great pleasure ...

Recently at my high school, we tested our digital microscope (ProScope) with SAM Animation and it worked. Our biology teacher, Vanessa Sandvil, took some neat pictures of tiny freshwater organisms (see screenshots below)! We have yet to use this tool combination with students but we are excited about the prospects ...

With Christmas approaching, HUE Animation Studio is swiftly becoming popular as a gift for budding animators everywhere! Surprise them with something a little different this year. HUE Animation Studio is designed to be easy for beginners to pick up but powerful enough to produce complex stop motion animations in the ...

Once you give SAM Animation to students, they will pick up on how to animate very quickly. It all boils down to repeating 2 steps -- Move Your Prop and Take A Picture. When you are done, press Play and you have created your first animation!I have taught students and ...

Let's face it, none of us really want to do test prep with our students. However, preparing for standardized testing is a reality of public education in this era. So, the question becomes how can we improve test prep and make it more engaging for our students? When students make ...

The Klutz Book of Animation is going on a blog tour, starting with HighTechDad Blog. Check out the link here, and pick up a copy of the book to start animating today! ...

Top-down "Floor Animations" I'm always exploring the web and finding different examples that people have done with stop-action animation and timelapse (aka. stuff you can do with the SAM Animation software). One category of animations that I really like are Top-down "Floor Animations." (Please: if you have a better/actual name, ...