iPad Camp Lives!

Kristin Reiber Harris

We are in the middle of the last week of our 4 session iPad Camp at Lynchburg College, sponsored by the Daura Gallery. It's been a blast. Each week there are two sessions offered, one for kids 8 to 12 in the afternoon and a second session for teens and adults in the evening.

I am helping Ryan and Callie work on Composer Pro  Credit: Lynchburg College

Why are we doing this?

My objective with the camp is to demonstrate what a great tool the iPad is for stimulating creativity and give the students an opportunity to play and experiment. I introduce four apps that I have found to be very accessible to kids and adults and get them rolling on creating their own media projects. The apps we are using are FlipBoomCartoon (animation), iMovie (video productiton), ComposerPro (book/game apps) and Procreate (art). It is very gratifying to see the students just take off and jump in.

 

Callie made this clever iMovie Trailer last Monday night after the first day of iPad Camp.

Students Projects
Here are a few of the ideas that evolved from the student these last two weeks:

Composer Pro book about a vacation to Disney World
Composer Pro book about the Civil War
Composer Pro book about a Hindu deity
Animation of a Celtic knot
Silly videos of each other
Look at the terrain and wild life of the rain forest
literally 50 short character animations (he counted the files for me, I didn't really think it was possible)
Animated cityscape with traffic
Baseball/video game morph
Animated segments about earth, fire, water and air
A stand off between a motorist and a cow
Animated larceny and it's consequences
Life cycle of a butterfly
numerous video trailers in iMovie 
news cast about iPad Camp that includes interviews with me and all of the students
 
Meet some of the Campers:
Erika, attending the first camp session for kids, was a fearless adventurer. The youngest camper, she embraced all four apps and made numerous animations and artwork that she put into a Composer Pro book. Here you see her intently working on building a brick wall in FlipBoomCartoon.

Erika focused on her brick wall animation Credit:Lynchburg College

Hyden did an excellent job on an animation about the rain forest. Here he is at his desk with the storyboard form beside him while he is working. This was a struggle for most of the campers, but I encouraged them to develop their ideas on paper before they started working. I like to say, when you're taking a walk, you head out the door with a destination in mind. This can change, but at the very least, you have to know where you are headed.

Hyden working on his rain forest animation Credit:Lynchburg College

Fulton was a prolific animator. A limitation of FlipBoom is the inability to add audio, but iMovie solves that problem easily with both native sound effects and recording. One of our first projects was to build a brick wall, demonstrating the concept of copying frames. Fulton took this a step further and built a city.

 

Fulton's Cityscape + car

Here is Fulton projecting his wall animation for all of the students to see. As you might guess, they liked sharing their work this way.

Projection system in the classroom let the students share their work in large scale.Credit:Lynchburg College

Where were the girls?
My one disappointment is that girls are extremely under represented in the kids' sessions. Where are you?? Two out of seven kids in the first kids camp were girls, second session it's seven boys, no girls. Next time I will more actively recruit girls, but this is a common theme in the technology workshops/courses I have taught over the years. We are seriously missing the boat not encouraging girls to get into technology and become tech savvy and media producers.

Final Wrap up with more student samples coming next week!