Multiple-character Animation Systems for Children at Different Educational Stages

抄録

Currently, children spend considerable time playing video games and watching videos, which affects their communication skills and speaking time. Previous studies have shown that visual art education helps young children to communicate their ideas. In addition, visual thinking programs improve the understanding of visual images and result in considerable improvement in mathematics, reading, and social emotional learning. In this study, we propose 2D interactive animation systems for children at different educational stages that can be used in visual art education programs. The proposed systems use a crowd simulation-based animation mechanism that does not require complicated keyframing or large amounts of hand drawings. Children have different abilities; thus, we developed two systems, one with minimum functions with voice input and the other with additional functions based on path-drawing input. The proposed systems were verified on primary school and kindergarten students. We allowed the students to use our systems freely by drawing anything and creating stories using their hand drawings. We observed that the students communicated with each other when they showed and talked about their work. The positive feedback obtained from discussion with teachers indicates that the proposed systems encourage communication between children.