Abstract
One of the major problems facing educators who teach computer animation is how to balance the technical and conceptual skills required to produce effective computer animation in a manner that is holistic. Often a single class cannot deal with both the conceptual and technical issues involved. When courses are offered separately, often students don't make the connections between them. By threading the course objectives across multiple classes, students are exposed to the connections between concepts and technology, and are challenged to build their own "conceptual bridges" to integrate ideas and techniques. This article addresses issues specific to teaching computer animation: how do you introduce students to all of the technical and conceptual aspects of animation in a way that will empower them to produce meaningful work?The Computer Animation Department at Ringling School of Art and Design has three required courses for the major in the fall semester of the sophomore year. These courses serve as an introduction to animation techniques and processes which students use throughout the curriculum. The courses are Computer Animation I, Concept Development I and Traditional Animation I. For the past two years, the faculty has been working on threading the course objectives in order to make students aware of the concepts and principles that are interwoven throughout the computer animation curriculum.This "threaded curriculum" is a work in progress. Our initial goals are to define the groupings of course objectives that the classes have in common, and to begin to track the connections. As we continue to refine the process, we are seeing more ways in which the connections can be made deeper, and we have also identified problem areas where the threading does not seem to be as complete.
Index Terms
Threading a sophomore computer animation curriculum
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