Instructify

BY BILL FERRIS

Many years ago, Walt Disney drew a little cartoon mouse who in turn built a theme park with his own four-fingered hands. Or something. Today, your elementary students can create cartoons of their own, as well as stories, drawings, cards and more at Kerpoof, an online creativity site brought to you by Disney.

Kerpoof gets kids creating with a simple interface that has a surprising amount of options. The movie section is particularly impressive — you can have several characters onscreen at once, and direct their movement, actions and speech. Compared to online animation tool Xtranormal, Kerpoof gives you far more control over your characters — Xtranormal’s free version only allows two characters, and they can’t walk around. However, Kerpoof doesn’t allow you to switch camera angles, nor do the characters have voice simulation (which may be a positive, depending on your point of view).For some tools, a lack of features is actually a positive. The DoodlePad gives kids a few colors and an eraser and lets them go to town. If kids just want to sketch or draw something quickly to illustrate an idea, the DoodlePad is perfect.

Kerpoof has lots of features to explore, including its own economy — the more kids play, the more “Koins” they collect, which enable them to buy stuff to trick out their Avatar, or add more characters and songs to the movie maker. To access all of Kerpoof’s features you’ll have to spend some real money for a membership. If you’d rather keep playing for free, though, there’s plenty on the site to explore. And it’s not like Disney is hurting for money.

In class, you could use Kerpoof for art projects, writing and movie-making assignments, re-tellings of classic tales, and anything else your creative brain can come up with. Who knows? Your kids may just create the next Mickey Mouse.

Kerpoof

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