What makes animations and games powerful education tools?

We’re more receptive to learning when we’re engaged and interested in the subject in question, but achieving this can be quite a challenge, particularly amongst children and young people.

A simple animation can be created with a modest budget. Because of the flexible nature of this format, characters and audio can be easily adapted to suit different audiences and age groups. This means even complex subjects can be tackled sensitively, using storytelling to inform and explain situations that may be difficult to illustrate in real-life scenarios.

What are the benefits of using animation in education?

Understanding the concepts and conveying the learning clearly is our primary aim when developing education-based animations. This approach is demonstrated in the range of games and animations we created for Oxford University Press directly linked to the curriculum. Adopting an infographic style for a range of subjects such as; Why does the Thames flood? What do we know about Africa today? What’s so great about Djibouti’s location? How is the earth changing? and, How do waves shape the coastline? These 13 animations provide teaching support for KS3 geography lessons.

Geog.123 Project

Another advantage of animation is that they’re not confined to classroom use only; students can use them outside school hours for recalling lessons or revision purposes, and younger students’ parents/carers can get involved by gaining insight into lesson content. This benefit was evident in the work we did with Oxford Owl, a free website for parents from Oxford University Press (OUP) offering advice and tips to support primary school children of all ages; the website also contains free resources to practise key skills at home. Keeping to a very tight timescale and budget, we worked closely with their designers and editors to produce animations that explain a few tricky maths, spelling and grammar topics to help parents and children with homework.

Penpals is a whole school handwriting scheme for 3 to 11 year-olds created by Cambridge University Press. We designed and developed 8 DVD-Roms for the revised series of resources, following up on the internationally best-selling series of Penpals first Editions. The interactive content was also designed so it can be delivered on the internet in the future. We were delighted when Penpals was shortlisted for a Bett Award 2017 in the Primary Digital Content category.

So it’s easy to see why animations and games are highly valued in education-based environments as effective learning tools. Talk to us if you’re interested in creating an animation for your organisation.