What’s Up Doc? Cartoons in Education

When many of us were children, we devoted many hours towards watching cartoons. Depending on what decade we were born in our favorite cartoon will probably differ. Another words, someone born in 1960s and someone born in the 1980s will have a very different opinion on which cartoons are classics.

Having said that, I am sure that we can all agree on the following; the cartoons of our childhood definitely conjure nostalgic memories and were definitely very enjoyable at the time. Likewise, the children of this generation also enjoy watching cartoons most of which are featured on Nickelodeon or the Cartoon Network. It also comes as no surprise that children of the previous generation and this generation are easily motivated by cartoons as evident by the wide selection of books featuring cartoon characters.

For this reason among others, creating cartoons is a great vehicle for encouraging students to write original stories or create stories centered on their favorite cartoon or comic book characters. Naturally, one will need some kind of computer application to aid with this process. For younger students I would suggest using either Kid Pix or Pixie. Older students will want to use a more sophisticated program such as Adobe Flash. Naturally, many would debate whether these software applications are the best for this purpose. To this end, I will briefly explain the reasoning behind my choice. For the younger students simplicity and wide spread usage were the guiding principles. Clearly, Kid Pix is one of the most widely used applications with younger children. However, I provided an alternative to Kid Pix as it is well known that many educators are not pleased with the recent changes made in Kid Pix. The choice of Adobe Flash is a little more straightforward. It is no secret that most of the web based games and cartoons are powered by Adobe Flash. Subsequently, my choice of Flash was a no-brainer.

Naturally, there are many wonderful applications that have “Flash like” features and I certainly would not want to discourage anyone from using those applications. More importantly, I encourage you to explore the value of developing cartoons with students, as it will unleash great creativity within your students.