Summerland Primary School in Auckland, New Zealand used iStopMotion for animation in their week long Film School for children from all over Auckland. The students who created these movies under the supervision of Claire Cheeseman range from 8 years to 14 years old.

The Physic Class of Mr Church at Littleton High School, New Hampshireworking works on a prototype of a system that heats a sidewalk (and melts snow on that sidewalk) using the waste heat from the school's boiler.

This article about an animation workshop resulted an animation project for the Utah Jazz. Michael Capell, who lead the animation team in the project, wrote to us about the project report at the Utah State Universities website. More background information and the animations can be found on Michael's site.

Marc Pentleton and his "Partners in Excellence" have been running an animation weekend with 17 students from different schools involved in the PiE project working on three different animated films in French and German using everything from Barbie dolls, finger puppets and Bob the Builder.

More Information on the PiE Home Page and the PiE Blog. (BTW, congrats Mark, for having your podcasts listed on the Apple iTunes Music Store.)

Apple Distinguished Educator Paul Shaw sends us a pointer to the Gold Coast KidsCongress™ where the kids created "The Challenge of Transport" using iStopMotion. KidsCongress™ is a technology and learning conference for 9-12 year olds that is run by kids for kids. A great idea worth being copied all over the world.

Mark Boylan of ICT Links held his first Summer School at the Courthouse Arts Centre in Otley, West Yorkshire in July. Vera created a nice report with the pictures and movies from the event.

The music school in Köniz (near Bern in Switzerland) organises a music camp every year. This year the head of the music school had the idea to set silhouette films by Lotte Reiniger to music. See the cool movies they created with iStopMotion and read more about the camp.

George Rota's Students were busy creating animations with iStopMotion. He writes:

The kids loved working with iStopMotion! It is so easy to use. I gave each class a computer, a tripod and movie camera and they went to work. I gave a 45 minute introduction and off they went planning and creating! I love their projects. We will be doing this again next year plus this summer I will be co-teaching an animation class with my son.

Mark Pentleton notifies us of the availability of the movies from the Film Festival of Partners in Excellence. The animations were made during a 3 day residential course where all participants (native English speakers living in Scotland) had to speak in French the entire time, while creating their stories and models. Mark writes:

First of all, thanks for a fantastic product in the shape of iStopmotion Pro which we continue to use in our language learning project. We've been using digital video for 5 years and we made our first films with iStopmotion last summer.

Partners in Excellence aims to give young people learning foreign languages more opportunities to practise their language skills in exciting and innovative contexts.