Okay, the production values are not great, but hear me out on this one.
This is a comp sci education classic from Nick Parlante at Stanford back in the 1990s. This was used in my university coursework to teach pointers, a concept than can be tricky to grasp when you’re new to computer science. What I like about this video is that it creates a fun, accessible, visually interesting representation of an abstract idea that is otherwise pretty arcane to most students. It doesn’t have amazing production values, but this is a genuinely transformative use of media arts in CS education.
I could see myself combining the animation concept with something like Robin et al.’s (2008) Analog Flash for Windows project, where students create an interactive exhibit demonstrating a physics concept to a general audience. Students could produce a video series as a class explaining computer science (or physics, or biology, or math, or history) concepts for general audiences.
This was created using Play-Doh and Quicktime by a computer science professor in his spare time. He has this to say about the process:
The total project time was probably around 100 hours spread out in “spare time” between late Dec 1998, and mid February 1999. Shooting the video was pretty easy. Most of the time seemed to go into editing and tweaking the video, sound, and text to all fit together. It might have been easier to record all the sound first, and then do the video knowing exactly how long each part should take (I believe this is how the Simpsons is done). It probably would have gone faster with a professional package like Adobe premier, but it costs a fortune compared to QuickTime 2.5 which was free and installed on my machine.
I was impressed how quickly many aspects of the video came together. The work was fun and the technology was well suited for the problem in most cases. Like any large project, there was work to get all the details right. With a little time and effort, it seems like anyone could produce one of these. To make things go quicker in the future, I might try to use a script where there were not too many timing constraints between the video, sound, and text.
Parlante, n.d.
For teachers, there are a lot of reasons to do something like this. Today, we have access to a plethora of free animation tools to create fun videos like this (probably not stop-motion, due to the editing requirements) for many subjects. My grade 6 students can and have made videos of similar length. This requires both an intimate understanding of the material and the ability to transform that understanding into something that is understandable to general audiences. A really neat side effect of having students produce this sort of educational video is that you can use their productions as teaching aids in future classes (with permission, of course). Naturally, adult staff can easily produce things like this themselves for their own classes.
Sources
Parlante, N. (n.d.). The Making of Pointer Fun. Stanford CS Education Library. http://cslibrary.stanford.edu/104/themakingof/.
Parlante, N. (1999a). Binky Pointer Fun Video C. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5VnDaHBi8dM.
Parlante, N. (1999b). Binky Pointer Fun Video. Stanford CS Education Library. http://cslibrary.stanford.edu/104/.
Robin, J., Berggren, D., & Gloag, A. (2008, April 13). Analog Flash for Windows. High Tech High Unboxed. https://hthunboxed.org/cards/analog-flash-for-windows/.