Presentation on cop3 writing

Today we were presenting our initial ideas, concept work and such for the first tutorial this year. Basically throughout this summer I decided I want to build from what I wrote about last year, but this time I would be focusing on specifically educational animation. 

Basically I want to build my dissertation from what I have learned last year, for a couple of reasons:

1) Adventure time, regular show, the Simpsons, all the mainstream animation series that are really successful seem to be very diverse with its target audience, raging from children to adults. I personally think that it is harder to  target children than adults, so ultimately if you can do the first one then you can definitely do the second one

2) Ultimately, I would like to pursue a career a major studio like Cartoon Network, which is primarily aimed towards children

3) I personally have went through 6 years of art school and I feel like I have been institutionalised rather than prepared for a life outside of school. I took me a lot to understand that my intelligence, maturity or creativity cannot be measured in standardised testing, at one point, last year I realised that my whole life I thought a good grade will secure you a good job and that made me really dependant on schools. Now I think it is a really wrong way think about education, because life is not as linear as schools make it look like, it is more organic and I should not be so scared of making mistakes.

4) My goal with this dissertation would be to research educational animation and see how it could be innovated and see how animation could be used as pedagogical tool more effectively.

So the subjects I want to look into would be:

•Pedagogy

•Animated tutorials (pros/cons)

•How children absorb information, what they respond to

•How animations is used as an educational tool and how it could be improved (is it underdeveloped?)

•How children respond to animation

         As part of my research, I was thinking of establishing that children respond to animation more than any other storytelling platform, this idea would be the core of my dissertation. The idea of the study is to approach a group of children with different stories delivered in different formats reading, listening and watching (animation) and see if children indeed respond to the animated story the most. If not, then I would try and figure out why?I am aware that different types of personalities and learning capabilities would be at play, as some people have kinetic memory, some have visual and others  have auditory. This is another thing I would like to research.

       The feedback that I got was that need to pin down what children's age group I want to focus on and see how television aims to very specific age groups. Another thing I was advised on was to not worry so much about schools but to think about how animation could be used in schools. Also I was told that the cbbc's team in Manchester is very approachable and they work alongside educators to produce animation for children.