The Teacher Toolbox

I once heard an interview with the Kiwi songwriter Neil Finn where he talked about how a ‘mistake’ can lead to a whole new song. As I tinker with new software I often find, when something is not quiet going the way I plan, I end up exploring a whole new tangent and produce something completely unexpected. I’m not saying that these tangets are worthwhile, but they are often ideas that would never have been produced without the initial mistake.

Recently my son and I have been experimenting with a plugin for the Steam games Half Life 2, Portal and Team Fortress 2 called Garry’s Mod. The mod allows you to manipulate your objects and characters to create scenes independent of the gameplay. It is what the Machinima community use to make Half Life 2 movies like Civil Protection.

Initialy I found it really hard to pose this character in a chair and that sparked the idea for this single panel cartoon.

So where do we encourage our students to make mistakes and then to value them?

Love, Death, Rhetoric & Half Life – A Blog Post in Two Parts.

1. Why do it?

- …because we can and because it is very, very EASY!
- Exposing students to ‘real’ 3d animation is cost prohibitive and rather complex. This is cheap and readily available.
- So much of schooling is ‘about’ stuff. Kids are required to write about, ‘the explorers’, about ‘the planets’ & about ‘what they did in the holidays’. Where do we encourage them to create new stuff? Where do we encourage them to produce stuff that has never been produced before?
- In my experience, ‘I can’t draw’ gets in the way of adults and children cartooning so this form of digital story telling eliminates the excuse.

2. To Foster Creativity

- How might you adapt it to make your own creative product?
- What might this sort of experimentation lead to if this type of thinking and experimentation is encouraged and celebrated?
- Do new with the new and encourage our students to do the same.
- Think and Question -  Compare the lines from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead with the Half Life context. How are they alike and different?
- Hypothsize the events before and after this graphic.
- Substitute other famous quotes for the dialogue in this comic. What new meanings can be created? eg ‘It is a far, far better thing I do than I have ever done before. It is a far, far better rest…’

So how did I come up with this idea? Bits of SCAMPER.

Combine – Half Life 2 screen shots, with Comic Life with a quote from a Tom Stoppard play.

Eliminate – I had heaps of other alternatives that I eliminated as they didn’t have the impact this idea had.

- So where does the thought to combine famous quotes come from? In my mind I seem to run very quickly through a heaps of possibilities and then I eliminate the ones of lesser worth or impact as I go. It is sort of like brainstorming without the butchers’ paper

For the people who aren’t into gaming or don’t know how to do screenshots I’ve put together a collection of images you can use for your own creative digital storytelling.

Enjoy

Adrian