Monday, April 16, 2012

Poof ? ? ?

A fun application with a weird name... That's what we kept ourselves busy in the computer club this evening. But more about that later. 

We started off by watching a video about a cool robot ...which can climb stairs, another which runs on a treadmill, and a third robot which... wait for it... does push-ups. :-) This was a nice way of rounding off our robotics lessons. Thank you to Mr. Woithe for sending me the link for this video.

So, let's get back to the "Poof" app.  With Kerpoof Studio you can make cards, movies, pictures, drawings, tell stories, or even 'spell a picture'. Tonight we were just interested in making movies though. Two of the characters (Jane Ryder and Slim Pikkens) I used in my movie can be seen below. 



Kerpoof can be accessed by pointing your browser to www.kerpoof.com where a simple registration process and email confirmation will create your account for you - free of charge. Classroom use is made easy by a teachers tool section which allows me to create bulk accounts for my learners with very little effort - if you know how. Just a few Excel text functions allowed me to strip, concatenate, auto fill, and auto-generate relatively random password for the whole computer club, and register them all without them needing email addresses. All of this in under 3 minutes. Isn't that just peachy?



Now as for the "create a movie" section which we delved into this evening...   The very colourful and well organized interface allows you to do the following in this order:


  • Choose a theme
  • Choose a scene
  • Choose from many characters
  • Animate your characters
  • Build your animations by placing commands on the 4-channel timeline

Competition
I turned this lesson into another competition for club members to participate in. And up for grabs, is another wonderful chocolate & sweet hamper from our friendly Sunridge SuperSpar. This is what they must do. Each club member must create a movie using Kerpoof aimed at entertaining the Gr. 2/3 crowds. The best move wins the hamper. Simple. These movies must be done by the next club meeting in two weeks.



Diary
Our next club meeting will be on Monday evening, 7 May 2012 at 17:15.

That's it for now. How yourself a smashing last half of April.


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