Animations for Storytelling
To enable girls to create the kinds of stories they envisions, I found it was necessary to create a set of high-level animations. To capture girls' story visions, I asked them to create detailed storyboards using a 3-step storyboarding process. In the first step, girls wrote a "back of the DVD box" description of their stories. In step two, they broke their stories into scenes. And, in step three, girls created drawings and textual descriptions of 6-9 frames for each scene. By analyzing these storyboards, I was able to identify a small number of animations necessary to create the kinds of stories girls envisioned. In Storytelling Alice, people can talk and think through speech bubbles, walk, change body positions, and touch objects.
Kelleher, C. and Pausch, R. Lessons Learned from Designing a Programming System to Support Middle School Girls Creating Animated Stories. VL/HCC 2006, 165-172.