There are two main Animation tools on Purple Mash:

2Create a Story and 2Animate.

2Create a Story

2Create a Story allows children to create their own multimedia digital storybooks. There are three modes of 2Create a Story: My Simple Story, My Story and My Adventure Story.

My Simple Story has a simplified user interface with fewer drawing tools, fixed font size, fewer animations and sounds and no background button. This is to make creating books easier for our younger children.

My Story includes added features such as backgrounds and sound recording using synthesizers.

My Adventure Story includes the functionality to create non-sequential links between pages and animate characters.

KS1

In KS1 our children use My Simple Story to create an e-book with simple animations, using and developing the painting skills they began to learn in Early Years. 

When they are ready to progress further, they are able to move on to the My Story mode to make their e-books more complex to include, for example, backgrounds and sounds.

LKS2

In LKS2 the children's skills are further developed and enhanced through the use of My Adventure Story which again provides them with greater opportunity to make more complex stories.

UKS2

In UKS2 our children continue to develop their animation skills, creating ever more complex e-books including downloading their own backgrounds, along with planning and creating Text Adventures based on their class Adventure.

For Text Adventures they begin by playing and analyzing an existing Text Adventure before planning their own, using the planning skills they learnt in 2Connect.

Then they use their animation skills to generate characters, backdrops, sounds, shout-outs and movement for their Text Adventure.

At each stage they check their work and debug any errors.

2Animate

In KS2 the 2Animate program enables our children to make short animations using their own drawings.

They begin with simple animations to which they start to add sounds.

They then move on to more complex animations using the "Onion Skin" tool which shows the previous frame as a transparent picture on the current frame so that they can draw a slightly different version of the previous slide.