Amaze your kids with LEGO® coding

Learn about the building blocks of programming languages with actual building blocks in this ingenious LEGO® coding project from ResearchParent.com!

Create a color Chromatography time-lapse

A simple and fun chemistry project to teach kids about mixtures and compounds. Head to the Home Science Tools blog to find out how to make this project at home. Use HUE Animation to capture a time-lapse video of the experiment so you don’t miss any of the action!

Newton’s disc reverse rainbow project

Learn about temporal optical mixing with this colourful hands-on physics experiment. Use your HUE camera to film the experiment and share with friends and family. Find out how to make your own Newton’s Disc in this video by YouTube channel Kids Fun Science.

Get creative with composite shapes

Check out teacher Heidi Neels’ super creative, cross-curricular activity spanning art, mathematics, animation and technology in this fabulous first grade composite shapes project! Get all the instructions to recreate this project at home in Heidi’s helpful blog post.

Add a string to your bow with an online violin lesson

Music teacher Carrie Salisbury, uses a HUE HD camera as a ‘FingerCam’ to help her students clearly see her violin finger work in online music lessons. Find out more about her studio set up in this brilliant blog post.

Still staccato for ideas? Then check out this fabulous Parts of a Violin stop motion video for even more musical motivation.

Make a paper surprise puppet

An easy afternoon activity for little (and big) kids to make on a rainy day. Watch Art For Kids Hub‘s video to make your own and surprise your friends on your next video call!

Make an origami animation

Increase the fun of origami twofold by adding animation to the paper shaping activity! Use HUE Animation to take a few pictures as you make each origami fold and watch the origami shape itself when you play the animation back! Youtuber Amazing Easy Origami has a brilliant example of self-folding origami in this video and loads of tutorials on their channel to keep little hands busy.

Supercharge your stop motion skills

Edu Puertas is a professional stop motion animator who shares awesome tutorials on YouTube. Watch Edu’s video below to learn how to add special effects, make LEGO® characters fly and more in this super stop motion skillshare.

Make household objects come alive with HUE Animation

Bring out the personality of a potato, make pillows fight and more with found object animation! You don’t have to always make characters to do stop motion, sometimes animation inspiration can be lying around your house, in the fridge or in your toy box! Check out animator Kevin Parry’s incredible object animations here to get some ideas.

Discover the hypnotic world of Strata Cut animation

Strata Cut is a claymation technique where layers of clay are sliced off a pre-prepared ‘loaf’ of clay and photographed to capture the animation inside. The loaf is made of different clay shapes, colours and patterns and pressed and twisted together to form a long loaf (actually it’s more like a baguette!)

Set up your HUE camera to focus on one end of the loaf and take a picture. Cut a thin slice off the loaf and move it up towards the camera so the cut end is the same distance from the camera as it was for the first picture. Take another picture and repeat the process until the loaf is all gone and you might end up with something like this!

Time-lapse garden cress
Marvel at the miracle of life in a time-lapse cress growing project! Cress takes about five days to a week to sprout and grow, so set HUE Animation to take a picture every 30 minutes so that you don’t end up with too many frames. We love this time-lapse cress example from the YouTube channel GPhase!

Film or stream a book read aloud

The benefits of reading to children is well documented, but for the times you cannot physically read together, HUE HD Pro cameras offer a hands-free solution for streaming and recording reading sessions for online sharing. So whether you’re reading Edgar Allan Poe or Poo in The Zoo, you can still read together with HUE.

Make ancient animation toys

What do Thaumatropes, Phenakistoscopes and Zoetropes have in common (aside from all being really difficult to pronounce)?

They are all early animation devices that create the illusion of moving pictures without a computer – and they are great fun to make and play with!

Thaumatropes are the most simple device out of the three, consisting of just two different pictures pasted back to back. The discs are spun really fast on a piece of string to trick the eyes into seeing both images at the same time, creating the optical illusion known as the persistence of vision. Get step by step instructions from RedTedArt in this cute and fun video.

If you have a copy of the HUE Book of Animation then you probably already know about Phenakistoscopes. Phenakistoscopes also work by spinning a disc with drawings on them, except this time the disc spins like a record on a turntable to create the illusion.

You can download one below. Technically, this is a Phenakistoscope, but since that word is entirely unpronounceable, and since this one has a rat theme going on, we’re calling ours a Ratoscope.

Download the Ratoscope.

Find out how to make one yourself in this great video by Howcast.

Zoetropes are the most complicated of the three devices to make but luckily YouTuber RimstarOrg is here to help us out with this detailed tutorial.

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