What is animation?
Animation has a pretty nerdy definition, “Rapid display of images to create an illusion of movement is called animation”. Too nerdy? Well its simple “I draw series of images showing a man walking with each picture having one specific position of his leg movement. If I show you these entire set of images one after other real quick, the man magically seems to move! This is the basic ideology behind animation.
Animations are interesting.
They have the power to gain the attention of a person for hours together without boring them. And sometimes animations are extremely helpful. They help us show and generate interest in something which we otherwise would not entertain.
On the other hand, learning is a pretty complicated process, well for me it’s a nightmare when it comes to studies. Now when you analyse the process of learning, “Concentration” will stand out to be the a major criteria for a better learning, followed by “Understanding” and finally “Remembering”. All these go hand in hand.
Have you ever wondered why we forget all the history we have studied in our social classes? But you can easily remember a scene in some animated movie which we have watched long time ago? It’s all in the way we got the information fed into our brain. Interesting/Boring both of these factors rule our learning process as well as memory.
Traditional ways of giving a lecture using text books and blackboards don’t really convey the complete gist of a lecture sometimes; and sometimes long lectures bore students and they get diverted easily letting him loose the first main criteria “Concentration”. Now as I said before, the moment he loses his concentration, he doesn’t understand the concept well and obviously can’t remember the topics for a long time.
Now what if I give the same lecture with an animation clip as a reference? Exactly! There is no point in loosing concentration. Because animations are interesting! They can be fun and informative at the same time. Animation today are not just confined to movies and video games; the areas of its application are boundless. And one of those areas is Education.
There are many multimedia enterprises out there which make animation clips for education purposes and sell them. Some upload them for free online. Here are some of the websites which provide free explanations for concepts using animations.
Now, student learning is not just cooped up to academics; one must sneak out of the academic fence and know things. Things which may be as simple as “why is earth round?” Are difficult to find in textbooks. Well the answer might be given in some corner of the book, but common! We don’t waste our time turning around pages just to find one answer! Make use of the great internet my dear fellow students! Where you can read the answers or WATCH them.
For people like me who like watching rather than reading (reading is boring!) obviously YouTube is a boon! Here are some of my favourite YouTube channels, “minutephysics” ,”Vsauce ” , “Scishow” , “The Science channel “. These channels are amazingly cool, Do subscribe to them! And the reason why I am telling you this is that they all are educative channels which use animations to explain things (well mostly). They are the only reason why I still love physics. Yes that is the truth!
Check all the links above and give them a try, It’ll surely make your learning process interesting. And for teachers, try explaining the concepts using animations next time, you’ll see the difference. You can use these free online animation tools to bring out the concepts clearly for your students in a fun way.
Here’s how you can learn through animation how technolgy is useful in education:
Now do you have an opinion? Want to share your experience? Know some better YouTube channels? I’d love to hear from you! Just comment below. Until then, happy learning!
