Students get a pizza the action with

Students get a pizza the action with stop motion

Onion, tomato, mushroom, capsicum, garlic, cheese, flour, yeast, and basil leaves. While these don’t sound like your everyday ingredients for a tech class, they proved the perfect recipe for learning the skills of stop motion animation (and pizza making, of course), writes Karishma Kumar.

This term we are taking on Food Technology. Students love cooking, learning new skills and collaborating in ways that involve digital technology, so I thought, why not highlight the practicality and fulfilment of all three? As a result, I decided to begin our journey by combining pizza making with stop-motion animation.

Pizzas were the obvious choice because we can use vegetables that are in season, practise knife skills, learn to make dough, use an oven, and find out about multitasking and collaboration, all at the same time. And, besides, who doesn’t like pizza! Many students had no experience with stop-motion animation (or making pizza from scratch), so I encouraged them to be creative and explore with the camera, as there was no pre-loading – other than a quick explanation of stop-motion and how the app works.

Cook, film and clean

The challenge was to follow a pizza recipe and capture the entire process using stopmotion animation, all within two hours. They had to proof the yeast, prepare the dough, cut the vegetables, and assemble the pizza. They also had to decide between themselves who worked on what, and then all together clean up afterwards. Each group was issued an iPad that used a free stop-motion app, Stop Motion Studio, which would allow them to capture each step of the pizza-making process. Students spent their next lesson on video editing and evaluating the process. We used an online video editing tool called WeVideo (wevideo.com/education), to which the school subscribes. Some chose to work together on a collaborative project, whilst others decided to express themselves more independently by taking a copy of the video and editing it to their own design. Videos contained expressive titles, music, and text captions to make the pizzamaking process come to life. Students developed skills including eye-catching text placement, utilising timings of the video for effect, and clip editing, such as cutting and pasting, adding freeze frames etc.

It was amazing to see such engagement, collaboration and multitasking when cooking and integrating with digital technology at the same time, followed by the video creation process. It was definitely a memorable experience.

Newfound experience

Student feedback was unanimous: a huge win, where they felt empowered to use their digital tech skills and their newfound experience in pizza-making to create a work of art that they could all be proud of. By the end of the session, they were chatting away about all the other ‘food stop-motion’ collaborations they would love to try at home. One student commented: “It was fun, it was a new experience.” Another added: “It was cool to watch and you get to see how the meal develops.” There were students who also found the process challenging, especially keeping good hygiene practices in between pizza-making and taking photos, as we didn’t have any tripods. “We were so busy [with preparation] that sometimes we forgot to take the photo,” admitted one student.

Educational diversity

The entire experience was filled with such educational diversity for everyone involved, that we will be adding another round of ‘food stop-motion’ again in the future, upon securing some tripods. (Unfortunately, due to shipping delays, they were on backorder and hadn’t arrived for this time.) The iPads now also have a thick screen protector to eliminate dirty fingers from damaging the screen. The biggest challenge for me was time. In two hours, they not only had to make the pizza but also needed time to eat their delicious creations and clean up afterwards. It was doable but if we’d had more time on the day, then students could get a bit more creative with the foods and edit their videos straight away (rather than waiting until the next week). I’m always looking for ways to innovate in the classroom, and because I teach Technology, I’m inspired to integrate opportunities for students to develop their digital and collaborative skills alongside. It keeps them excited, engaged, and wanting to try something different each time.

Looking ahead, you can create a stop-motion animation of any meal, especially filming the preparation of it. Next time, I will try baking and challenge my students to think creatively (like walking chocolate buttons onto a cookie). There are so many ideas, the options are endless. It’s a lot of fun once you get the hang of it. Karishma Kumar teaches Year 7 and 8 students at Bailey Road School in Auckland.

Introducing Stop Motion Studio

This is an easy-to-use app that allows users to produce animations using a mobile device (iOS, Android and Windows). It has a versatile set of editing tools for creating HD videos, including manual and user-defined shooting, remote operation, and green screening. More at cateater.com