Cartoonimator

A simple market drawing of green hills, sea, forest and sky. A small boat and sun drawing are pasted on top on separate slips of paper.

Computational thinking has been identified as an important skill for children to learn in the 21st century, and many innovative kits and tools have been developed to integrate it into children’s learning. Yet, most solutions require the use of devices like computers or other expensive hardware, thus being inaccessible to low-income schools and communities. We present Cartoonimator, a low-cost, paper-based computational kit for children to create animations and engage with computational thinking. Cartoonimator requires only paper and a smartphone to use, offering an affordable learning experience. Children can draw the scenes and characters for their animation on the paper, which is printed with computer vision markers. We developed the mobile web app to provide an interface to capture keyframes and compile them into animations.

ACME LabÌýÌý

Associated Researchers

Publications

Krithik Ranjan, Peter Gyory, Michael L RiveraÌýandÌýEllen Yi-Luen Do. 2023. "". In:ÌýProceedings of the 22nd Annual ACM Interaction Design and Children ConferenceÌý(IDC '23). (Chicago, IL, June 19 - 23, 2023).