Today, we had a workshop involving animation. The ‘Animate Your Name’ workshop begins with an introduction to sprite animation. The previous project ‘About Me’ has every sprite doing something unique that tells the player about the author of the program. I explained to the students that this workshop program consists of taking your first name, middle name or last name and ‘animating’ every letter of it. Each letter did something unique, like change color. As an example, my program ‘Mr. Mike’ had the 1st letter play the ‘Meow’ sound, the 2nd letter change color, the 3rd letter flipped 360 degrees, the 4th letter disappeared and re-appeared, the 5th letter grew and shrunk in size like a heartbeat and the 6th one allowed the background to change multiple times. I challenged each of my students to create something better than what I did.
DIVAS (Digital Interactive Visual Arts Sciences) for Social Justice aims to bridge the digital divide by combining media literacy and cultural awareness along with a vast understanding of technology to encourage young women in under served communities to pursue careers in computer science and new media.
