Stikbot in the Classroom

Have you ever heard of Stikbot? Have you every thought about using it in your classroom? We do a lot of research projects in my 2nd grade classroom and once students have researched and researched and researched they have to prepare to present their findings. One cool and engaging way for them to do that is to use the Stikbot App! 

I learned about Stikbot from one of my tech classes at Winthrop while I was getting my Masters. It’s a free app that helps you create stop motion animation. There’s also these really cool, flexible figures that go with the app, but you can also use other things!

In my classroom I’ve used the Stikbot app to provide an option for students to visually present research findings from our animal project. My students used Play-doh to create their animals and created a stop motion animation of their animal based on some thing they learned.

Our research project was inquiry based. Students picked an animal based off of the animal books we had in our classroom. I had gathered all the books that went together and made “sets” of 3-4 books on animals. They explored and chose the topic they wanted to explore. I guided students through the research process by first exploring the books. Then we moved to books on Storia and then we used websites (Discus and National Geographic for Kids). Once they had all their research students wrote an informational book on their animal. Part of the project was also, to take it public! They each chose to do a Blabberize (I’ll tell more on that later) or a stop motion animation using Stikbot!

The students that chose Stikbot first sketched out what they wanted to do with their video in their research notebooks. Then they showed it to me to get approval! Next, they created their scene or background. I let students completely work independently on this. I gave them their materials and explained the reason for the background, along with showing them one example from a previous year. Then they got started! I was super impressed with their backgrounds and the detail they put in them on their own!

Once they had their backgrounds completed they created their animal and any other animals out of Play-doh. I also had one student that created paper animals instead of Play-doh. You could do that as well! You could even use toy animals if you had them! Once they created their animals they set them up in the scene they created and began taking pictures. I had students use iPads with the kickstand attached. This helped them keep the iPad in one place to help make their animations more fluid. One student also included a voice over, although I did not make that mandatory. Being in 2nd grade, I thought that would be a little harder for them to match up what they say with their animation. If you teach older grades you could totally include that as an extra component!​

Here are some examples of what my students did! One includes a voice over, which is an option you could give your students if you wanted to! 

If you’d like to learn more about Stikbot check out this website! http://howellpln.weebly.com/stickbots.html