You may already be familiar with Goldieblox toys. I’ve featured a couple of them on this blog. I recently visited their site, and they’ve added quite a few more products to their selection – all with the aim of getting children, especially girls, interested in engineering. One of the kits available for purchase is “Goldieblox and the Movie Machine“, which includes pieces and directions for creating a zoetrope. The company has released a free app to complement this product, but you don’t need to purchase the kit to get a lot of fun out of the app.
Our Maker Club has transitioned from making cardboard games to making movies, and one of the apps the students explored last week was Goldieblox and the Movie Machine. They quickly figured out what they needed to do to create their own short animations, and they were too busy having fun to ask for help from me. The club is still testing out different options for movie creation, so we haven’t worked our way up to making final products, but I think this app will definitely be a contender for most popular movie-making tool (along with the Lego Movie Maker app).
If you do happen to have the actual kit, then you can use the app to print out your drawings to put in the zoetrope. However, this is certainly not mandatory, as you can watch your video play on the iPad just as easily.
I definitely recommend that you add this to the list of apps from which students can select for sharing their learning. They could, for example, make a video of the life cycle of a butterfly or portray how a character changed in a novel. I’m sure you can think of many more ways to integrate it with academics!
