GoldieBlox and the Movie Machine

GoldieBlox and The Movie Machine is an interactive animation application by the children’s multimedia company GoldieBlox. GoldieBlox is directed towards elementary aged girls (8+) and encourages them to think outside the Barbie Doll box. This company empowers young girls to potentially pursue careers in the STEM fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics and instills these skills at a young age. Their hope was to break down gender stereotypes and they did just that! The application focuses on basic engineering skills like drawing and animation. Along with engineering skills, the application works on users spatial skills, reading skills, and problem solving skills. The application GoldieBlox and The Movie Machine is an animation building application that allows users to easily build their own short movies and animations. There are three options at the beginning, which allows the user to select watch, learn, or make. There are many videos the user can watch to understand the concept of the application and the potential end goal. Then, the user can select learn to learn how to create animations in an easy, step-by-step platform with tutorials. There are various illustrations that show movement and how to incorporate movement in animation, such as a running man, a bouncing ball, moving text, and swinging objects. After watching and learning about creating short animations, the user can make their own! The application offers 12 different scenes, 20 different stamps, 3 paintbrush shapes along with many sizes for each, 16-color palette, multiple eraser sizes, and a camera feature. With these inventive drawing tools and stamps, the user has a lot of control to use their imagination to create their very own short animation. The variety of features one can select allows for creativity and individualism amongst users. The photo-capture tool allows for users to make their movie even more individual by inserting a picture of themselves and adding animations. This application would be difficult to integrate into a classroom because of it is so geared towards girls. However, the application recently introduced a male character within the animations to potentially open the application to all genders. Because the company and applications goal was to break down gender stereotypes, I think educators should do the same by using the application to teach ALL students that gender does not define your skills. I would recommend using the application in classrooms for group work to create movies in teams or to individually create movies and have a “Film Festival” in class to showcase everyone’s work. While the application itself is free and very beneficial to users, for an addition 29.99, one can purchase the actual movie machine! This allows for users to print out their animations and place them into a pre-cinema animation device, a zoetrope. This allows the user to watch their movie come to life and can leave them with a real sense of accomplishment and will encourage more building and engineering in their future.