Playbook: An Animation-Based Game for Improving Children's Creativity and Problem Solving Skills

In this paper, we describe the design, development and preliminary evaluation of a novel animation tool for smartphones and tablets, with the goal of improving creativity and problem-solving ability among novice users, mainly young children. The user first draws the objects with markers and crayons on paper and takes a photo with their mobile or tablet to import their drawings into the app as game sprites. They then design their animation scene and point to a part of the character and selecting its animation type from existing buttons. Hence the selected part is animated in a vertex shader while ensuring a smooth transition with the non-pointed part. The results of a preliminary evaluation showed that young children enjoyed interacting with our tool and would recommend it to their friends. Keywords and Phrases: Creativity; video games; visual animation; ease of use.