BrainPOP Inspires Student Animation Projects

Posted by Andrew Gardner on

Guest Blogger Cheryl Phillips in an Instructional Technology Resource Teacher in Prince William County Public Schools, VA.  In today’s guest blog post, Cheryl shares how BrainPOP is now inspiring her students to create their own animation. Cheryl story proves that BrainPOP is much more than just a movie and a quiz!

I’ve have been a frequent user of BrainPOP since its inception back in 1999. At the time, I was teaching fourth graders and using the program whenever I could get my students in front of a computer. BrainPOP was an excellent program for enhancing our curriculum, whether it was science, social studies, math, language arts…it was all there just waiting to engage the students with Moby and Tim along for the ride.

As the years pass, Moby and Tim have grown up right along with the students. We’ve entered into the 21st-century and BrainPOP has a plethora of products which are fully compatible with an all inclusive techno world that our students are now enjoying! My students today include middle school and while I’m no longer a classroom teacher, I now enjoy teaching students how they can integrate their objectives with technology, which is exactly what BrainPOP has been doing for years!

A student favorite is learning to animate. Animation is the perfect tool for students to show off what they’ve learned. You can take any objective and have the students create an animation as their evaluation. The challenge comes when trying to give them an example and this is where Moby and Tim come to the rescue. Once the students learn the art of animation using a program like Tech4Learning’s Frames5 program, we watch a BrainPOP video and study the animation and delivery of information. The students are now watching the video through the eyes of a ‘movie maker/animator’ and not just watching for the content. Upon conclusion, you can hear the collective, “Ah-ha” from the students and they are chomping at the bit to get started!

Our students have come full circle with BrainPOP, from elementary school learning laughing at the antics of Moby and Tim to middle school and learning how to animate. Today, we enjoy BrainPOP for all it continues to offer and then some!  Now the students are creating their own teaching animations with their own Moby and Tim doing the introduction!

Check out these examples of Cheryl’s Students animations about Winston Churchill, Charles Darwin and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.  If you’d like to submit your own student inspired BrainPOP movies, we’re thrilled to share them with the BrainPOP Educators community.  Get in touch!