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Creating Digital Animations: Animate Stories with Scratch!
The easy way to start animating today! Creating Digital Animations is your ticket to learning animation! Learn how to animate your very own characters using Scratch—the free multimedia tool that lets you create interactive stories, games, and animations. Designed specifically for kids aged seven and up, this easy-to-follow, full-color guide introduces you to important game design concepts through three simple projects. Step-by-step instructions walk you through the four major phases of animation design, showing you how to turn your idea into a real animation with sound effects and more! You'll work just like the pros as you sketch out your main idea, add your own details, and develop a complete, workable character from scratch.
If you're curious about coding, animation is the perfect place to start exploring. The Scratch platform doesn't require an actual programming language, but it gets you used to thinking like a programmer while you develop your very own animation. Short on rules but big on fun, this book is your friendly animation coach to get you started on the right foot.
Use stick figures to design your characters' 'bones' Flesh out your design and animate movements Create scenes and background locations Add sound to take your animation to the next level Animation is fun! Building your own characters is exciting! And putting the finishing touches on your animation project shows you just how much you can learn while you play. Coding is a valuable skill that will serve you throughout school and beyond, and this book teaches you the basics in a way that leaves you hungry for more. Where will you take your new animation skills next? Creating Digital Animations takes you on the first steps of your journey to wherever you want to go!
If you're curious about coding, animation is the perfect place to start exploring. The Scratch platform doesn't require an actual programming language, but it gets you used to thinking like a programmer while you develop your very own animation. Short on rules but big on fun, this book is your friendly animation coach to get you started on the right foot.
Use stick figures to design your characters' 'bones' Flesh out your design and animate movements Create scenes and background locations Add sound to take your animation to the next level Animation is fun! Building your own characters is exciting! And putting the finishing touches on your animation project shows you just how much you can learn while you play. Coding is a valuable skill that will serve you throughout school and beyond, and this book teaches you the basics in a way that leaves you hungry for more. Where will you take your new animation skills next? Creating Digital Animations takes you on the first steps of your journey to wherever you want to go!
128 pages, Kindle Edition
First published March 1, 2016
15 people are currently reading
21 people want to read
About the author
Derek Breen
23 books3 followersDerek Breen began his first job, a daily paper route, back in 1980 with the intention of saving up enough money to buy his first computer. He purchased a Commodore 64 computer toward the end of sixth grade and spent most of the summer before starting junior high designing sprites, learning the Basic programming language and coding rudimentary games.
Derek was introduced to Scratch while working as a summer instructor for ID Tech Camp at MIT in 2011. While he could appreciate how the software enabled younger children to quickly produce animation and simple games, the pixelated graphics and programming limitations kept him from considering using it in the high school computer science classes he was hired to teach that fall.
Then Scratch 2.0 came along and suddenly his mind was blown by all of the possibilities. The addition of vector graphics, cloning and cloud-based variables added enough power to make it a complete multimedia-authoring platform, basically Adobe Flash for kids.
Derek is a founding member of the Instructional Design and Educational Media Association (IDIEM) and is an active member of the Scratch Educator (ScratchEd) community (scratched.gse.harvard.edu). Most recently, he worked as a graphic designer on the StarLogo Nova project (www.slnova.org) at MIT, as a teaching fellow in Instructional Design at Harvard Extension school and as a curriculum developer for i2 Camp (www.i2camp.org).
Previously, Derek worked as a computer science teacher at Prospect Hills Academy in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was the owner/operator of Mod, a cybercafé and digital learning center in Charlottesville, Virginia, and served as a new media producer for KCAL9-TV in Los Angeles, California.
Derek was introduced to Scratch while working as a summer instructor for ID Tech Camp at MIT in 2011. While he could appreciate how the software enabled younger children to quickly produce animation and simple games, the pixelated graphics and programming limitations kept him from considering using it in the high school computer science classes he was hired to teach that fall.
Then Scratch 2.0 came along and suddenly his mind was blown by all of the possibilities. The addition of vector graphics, cloning and cloud-based variables added enough power to make it a complete multimedia-authoring platform, basically Adobe Flash for kids.
Derek is a founding member of the Instructional Design and Educational Media Association (IDIEM) and is an active member of the Scratch Educator (ScratchEd) community (scratched.gse.harvard.edu). Most recently, he worked as a graphic designer on the StarLogo Nova project (www.slnova.org) at MIT, as a teaching fellow in Instructional Design at Harvard Extension school and as a curriculum developer for i2 Camp (www.i2camp.org).
Previously, Derek worked as a computer science teacher at Prospect Hills Academy in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was the owner/operator of Mod, a cybercafé and digital learning center in Charlottesville, Virginia, and served as a new media producer for KCAL9-TV in Los Angeles, California.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
April 19, 2022
A good intro to Scratch, a very basic digital animation program, and the book is designed for kids.
It is a decent book and was probably a bit too much of a kids book (which it is), for me.
I sped read though the first third before realising the animations I'm after are better achieved in different programs and learnt from a different book.
It is a decent book and was probably a bit too much of a kids book (which it is), for me.
I sped read though the first third before realising the animations I'm after are better achieved in different programs and learnt from a different book.
Displaying 1 of 1 review