In studying American India Foundations projects, one that was particulary fascinating was a digital animation, writing, creativity project jointly worked on by middle school students in New Delhi, India and East Oakland, California. Instead of just reading about “social studies”, they are actually working on school assignments with foreign students.

The Telling Stories – Brainstormer Project (TSB), in cooperation with San Francisco State University, allows students to use highly sophisticated computer technology to create their own animated video stories (using self-created animated caricatures of themselves)  illustrating how they would solve assigned classroom projects.

American students and Indian students are put together in teams working to solve problems. They must learn to communicate with each other, and learn about cultural differences and obstacles in resolving the problems. They also get an amazing opportunity to develop technical skills, which can help them with future careers.

Barrett Fox, Director of the Brainstormer project, says the project “is a collaborative, videogame technology-based idea sharing environment. Through 3D animated caricatures of themselves, users present their ideas in online brainstorm sessions. These characters have visual auras representing the user’s ideas and can share and present those ideas with expressive and informative gestures and with the user’s own voice.”

“In these classes, we explore & create students’ stories using a wide variety of mediums and technologies. Cadets write, draw, act and animate their story and character ideas. This is done using tools like graphical information visualization software, blogs, digital video and photography and video conferencing to name a few.”

“The centerpiece of the class is training these middle school students to animate with Autodesk’s Maya professional animation software. This is the same tool used to create Gollum in the Lord of the Rings movies and Yoda in the recent Star Wars movies.”