My first free educational resources for homeschooling 1st grade kids / preschoolers

Hiello everyone,
I’m a mother of two children (2yo and 5yo), i’m a software engineer and i’am a Free Software veteran. That is why i started creating free educational resources with free software for my kids. I’m looking forward your advice and suggestions, Of course i’m usnig Free Software only. (plz. see the list below)

And here is my first serie for homeschooling preschoolers:

Since i’m still learning and a newbie with Blender, those animations have been made with:

  • GIMP
  • INKSCAPE
  • Synfig Studio
  • Audacity
  • Blender
  • Python
  • Freepik.com

Free softwares only and royalty free graphical arts.

What do you think of it?
Is it possible to do all the animation work with Blender, even if i’m only using 2d?
What should I improve for my next educational series ?

And a big thank to the Free software community and people behind blender (^_-)

Any advice ? Suggestions ?

It can be done. Just make sure you have a plan thought out and write it down on paper.

Sure, you can even make 2D animation in Blender with the grease pencil.
This is a very good channel, he is a developer of the grease pencil.

Here you can download a whole scene and test it

Have fun

designwise i would prefer less distraction, less animation… more simplicity
like no brush while learning about colors for example
movement distracts, takes attention of every being capable of seeing

I can imagine it being difficult to create something that would keep kids engaged in what they are learning :), and you’ve done quite admirably, I think. Although, without having kids of my own, I couldn’t really say what you could do to make it better :D.

I also haven’t done 2D stuff before, but as everyone has mentioned, I think you could do the animation in Blender okay. For doing stuff like what you’re doing, I think all you would have to do is put the images onto planes with a material, then use the alpha of the image to make the non-colored parts of the plane invisible. After that you could just animate the planes moving around like you have in your video. Also, by using Lattice modifiers with shape keys, you could squish the planes in the middle like you do in your animations. This video shows the process of adding an image to a plane and what it would look like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdrFMEgNgF4 . This one is a bit old, and I’m not sure what might have changed in the interface since it was made, but it shows the same process, only using an add-on to simplify things: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ub2a3kSfrw4 . The add-on is still included with Blender.

There was also this add-on I had seen a while ago that shows a process for animating 2D cutout people that could help:

As others mentioned before, the grease pencil can also be great for it. There’s really going to be some awesome updates to it whenever 2.8 comes out that will help a lot for the kind of animation you’re doing. Here was the full list of additions:

Hope some of it helps! You’re really doing a great job! If it doesn’t work out with Blender, there is also the open source animation software used to create Futurama, as well as Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli’s many movies like Spirited Away and The Wind Rises, called OpenToonz: http://www.cartoonbrew.com/tech/heres-download-opentoonz-studio-ghiblis-free-animation-software-138465.html. I don’t know if it would work for what you’re doing, but it might. Krita is also able to do animations that you could use Blender’s VSE Video Editor to add sound and things to.

Thank you very much every one for your help!
I’ve started using the Blender VSE combined with my other tools like Inkscape, Audacity and SynfigStudio, and here is my new educational video series foor children : https://youtu.be/3dLv5deySrA I’ll try automating things with Python and the blender API. Then i’ll start animating using either 3d capabilities of Blender or stick with 2d aniations and use the Grease pencil.
Thank you once again :slight_smile:

Sorry it took so long to respond, but you’re welcome! Your new video really turned out great! It looks like you were able to figure out everything all right :slight_smile:

Nice work. I was a special Needs teacher for almost 10 tens. You will catch the eye of kids for sure. Simple but done well.