Saturday, June 2, 2012

Our Fantastic Toontastic Session with Andy Russell!


On Wednesday, we had the wonderful opportunity to meet and learn from Andy Russell, one of the co-founders of Toontastic. Not only did Andy want to meet and talk with our students about their experiences using Toontastic, but he also wanted to impart a very important message to 4th graders: It's never too early to develop your ideas and turn them into something special. Andy emphasized that you don't have to wait until you go to college to develop and refine your big ideas. He shared that 70% of the process of developing an app or any piece of software can be mapped out using paper prototyping. Andy even showed us the early paper prototypes of Toontastic and how he used them to test his ideas with users.
The first Toontastic stage











So cool to see the first paper prototypes of Toontastic! 




















 
Now to add the screen frame to test how it all fits.
Andy also took ideas from the group to create a brainstorm of a game, which he then showed us how to mock-up using Keynote.  The students were highly engaged and very inspired about how they could take their own ideas and test them out with a prototype.


Taking our ideas for our chicken-wolf game!





Using Keynote to make our first game mock-up


































After the talk, Andy, and his partner, researcher and cognitive psychologist Alicia Chang, observed the students using the app. It will be interesting for them to study how our kids' Toontastic storytelling changed over the course of 3 test sessions.

Yesterday, we wrote thank you emails to Andy and Alicia, and from those emails, I can tell that our kids had a wonderful, inspiring experience!

1 comment:

Unknown said...

I believe that the experience the students have got from communicating with this successful person can really motivate them and show them that even the smallest ideas can grow into something great and fun, not to mention the work of one's life. It is said that the students should wait to develop their ideas before they go to college. I think that students should also think about their success now and search for custom essay writing service in order to think about their future academic success now.