SYNC OR SWIM Rough Animator

In the Spring 2016 issue of Screen Education, I looked at an app called Loop, which could be used for making really simple animations. This is how I started that article: Animation is an amazing way to bring content alive. For many students an animation can be that doorway into understanding wider theoretical concepts. It moves on from the nineteenth-century teaching techniques of pantomime gestures, students as props, or ‘movement lines’ in diagrams, and into explanations with actual moving parts. That’s what translates it from a concept to an idea. That’s what moves it from a premise to a fact. The other truths of animation are that it’s really difficult, it’s really time-consuming, and it’s much more suited to those fanciful timewasters in the Visual Farts department. It comes so easily to them and what do they use it for? Dancing meat and Thug Life sunglasses!¹

It’s a few years on, but this is as true now as it was then: animation is still super important in teaching, it’s still great for exploring complicated theoretical concepts, and Visual Arts teachers are still fanciful timewasters. The one thing that has changed is that Loop, the focus of the article, doesn’t exist anymore. Loop was developed by design studio Universal Everything as a way to quickly workshop an idea visually – and, because it’s the twenty-first century now and visuals aren’t intrinsically static, these design sketches needed to be able to capture movement. But apps need to be updated in line with operating systems, and Universal Everything isn’t an appdevelopment agency, etc. In a nutshell, Loop no longer exists.

Loop’s non-existence helps us to investigate two (sort of) related dilemmas: 1) How do you futureproof your educational-technology plans so you don’t get really invested in tech that won’t last?; and 2) What do you do when you’ve identified a