The power behind iCreate lies in the research. We bridge the innovation in the university research lab with the creativity in the classroom, and SAM Animation is our flagship product exemplifying our mission.
The National Science Foundation grant that funded the original development of SAM Animation gave Tufts researchers the ability to take the time needed to refine a tool that allows students to spend time creating rather than learning the software.
Under Brian Gravel’s lead, Tufts researchers have identified the “Science of SAM Animation”, which accounts for the research behind stop-motion as a learning tool. Download the PDFs below and watch the quick video on how stop-motion enhances learning in the K12 classroom.
Science of SAM White Paper
Tufts University research excerpt
Science of SAM chart
White paper overview graphic
Teaching Parabolic Motion with SAM
International Journal for Engineering Education
Research outside Tufts University further supports the efficacy of SAM Animation in the classroom. Leaders in their fields, Jean Piaget and Eleanor Duckworth, both provide evidence that when children produce something themselves, thereby becoming authors, they experience an enhanced learning experience.
As early as 1959, Piaget recognized the importance of building new knowledge by exploring and revising our existing knowledge – a process that comes to life through working with SAM.
More recently, Eleanor Duckworth has done work out of Harvard University on the difference between presenting children with ideas and them developing a true understanding of those ideas through their own personal struggles to find individual meaning; to become owners of their own knowledge.
“It is possible, then, for a child’s understanding of this kind of necessary relationship to evolve in especially devised situations more quickly than it would spontaneously. But it is not the pressure of data that gives rise to the understanding. It is, on the contrary, the child’s own struggle to make sense of the data.”
You can purchase her book, The Having of Wonderful Ideas and Other Essays on Teaching and Learning here for more information.
SAM Animation is a classroom tool that can help facilitate this kind of in-depth understanding for students. By having them plan, explain, and create, they become authors and producers of their own knowledge, rather than passive recipients of classroom lessons.
New research out of a Jobs for the Future Project – Students at the Center: Teaching and Learning in the Era of the Common Core – provides further evidence for the benefit of using student-centered digital technologies like SAM Animation to design curricula that are flexible enough to adapt readily to individual differences.
