There are a few “getting started” elements that provide insight on the main tools and features but users are free to start on their own.

The app can be installed within minutes and its interface is easy to understand as all of the main buttons are sorted in toolbars based on their category. With software such as Maya, you can make the ball cast a shadow in just the right place, too.Jasc Animation Shop is a photo editor application that can easily be used to create animations, too. The user can change the path just by changing the line. The program also produces a graph (below) that shows the path of the ball (the green line). The software records the movement and plays it back. (All the big movie studios use Maya.) Instead of making 24 separate pictures, he can make just a few and tell the computer how he wants the ball to bounce. George Washington University computer science professor Bill Vitucci created the ball using a program called Maya. The five frames of the bouncing red ball below may give you an idea how it's done on a computer. If you did it by hand, you would have to make 24 drawings of the ball in slightly different positions (like the flipbook). Suppose you wanted to make a one-second animation of a bouncing ball, for example. Animation Shop costs about $40, but you can get a free 30-day sample at Computer-savvy kids age 10 and up can probably learn this. Kid Pix sells for about $20 and can be used by children 5 and older. You can use these to make the frames for a 'flip book' on the screen and then play it like a real animation. To do the same thing on a computer, you could try a program called Kid Pix, or see if your school has Jasc Animation Shop 3. What do you see? This is similiar to an animated movie, where each picture is a frame. * Now hold the stack of cards and riffle through them with your thumb from the back of the deck to the front. Arrange them so the first picture (the fully grown flower) is the top card and last picture (just dirt) is the bottom card. * Stack the cards with the pictures facing up. * Cut out each of the flower pictures above. It's nothing but a bunch of still pictures - each a little different - arranged to make you see motion.

Jasc animation shop 3