Tricia Fuglestad

Students are pushing each other’s buttons all the time, creating stress, frustration, and other strong emotional reactions that sometimes lead to dysregulation and conflict. What if you could use this button-pushing behavior to create an engaging media arts activity that builds their skills in stop-motion animation, digital animation, identifying emotions, and artistic expression?

Art creation can be a nonverbal, safe outlet for children working through emotions by externalizing feelings outside themselves, making those emotions easier to recognize and safe to talk about—especially if the subject is an inanimate object. Allow me to lead you through the steps of animating an inanimate robot inspired by PETER O’METER, the “eMotional” robot.

Talking about facial expressions and the act of pushing buttons is naturally a part of this animation process, but what if it were a natural part of self-reflection?

Animate the Inanimate
I created a kit for my students that gives them all the tools to get started on this digital media project as an introductory lesson. The kit helps them make their emotional robot from paper, move the pieces for their stop-motion animation, and draw over the images using Canva’s drawing tools to digitally refine the results. From there, they can export an animated video of an expressive robot complete with color and audio enhancements.

Introducing PETER
The kit includes a head-and-shoulders version of PETER, a Programmable, Empathetic, Touch-sensitive, Emotional Robot from the augmented reality children’s book, PETER O’METER (see Resources). This template features a blank face, an eMotion panel with six emojis (anger, happiness, sadness, peace, love, and fear) and an empty gauge. This sheet is printed out and serves as the basis for the stop-motion animation. It gives students a chance to choose which facial expression matches each emoji/button that was “pushed.” The empty gauge offers an extra opportunity to coordinate color with emotion by drawing an indicator arrow.

Next, there is a sheet of six different facial expressions for the robot that can be printed and cut out. Each expression matches one of the six emojis on the panel. Students take a moment to identify each expression and match it with the corresponding button on the panel in preparation for the animation.

Make it. Move it.
Students create their stop-motion animation using a series of fourteen photos. This can be done with an iPad, phone, web camera, document camera, or any similar device. I advise students to work from an overhead view with a mounted stationary camera to enhance the illusion of movement in their animation. Weʼve used iPad stands, shelving, tape, and careful balancing to accomplish this.

Tape down the robot paper so it also doesn’t move during the photographing process. The idea of this media project is to create the illusion that PETER’s facial expression changes to match the corresponding emotion when each emoji button is pressed on his panel. The only elements that will change from frame to frame are the facial expression and your finger pressing a button.

The shot list for the photos is as follows:

1. Smiling face only (establishing shot).
2. Finger pressing the first button (anger emoji) with an angry face.
3. Angry face only.
4. Finger pressing the second button (happy emoji) with a smiling face.
5. Smiling face only.
6. Finger pressing the third button (sad emoji) with a sad face.
7. Sad face only.
8. Finger pressing the fourth button (calm emoji) with a calm face.
9. Calm face only.
10. Finger pressing the fifth button (love emoji) with a loving face.
11. Loving face only.
12. Finger pressing the sixth button (fearful emoji) with a fearful face.
13. Fearful face only.
14. Smiling face only (reset and loops back to establishing shot).

Enhance It
Now students prepare the photos for a digital animation enhancement using Canvaʼs built-in tools to add color and audio, making this tiny video even more expressive.

Now comes the fun part! Open Canvaʼs drawing tools (found in the left menu) to add color and visual effects. Youʼll create a modified rotoscope animation by simply adding color to the photos. Pick six different colors to represent the emotions displayed in the animation. For example, when the finger presses the angry emoji, add red to the button, gauge, antenna, and anywhere else that will respond to this strong emotion. (Perhaps lightning bolts shoot from his ears!) Switch colors for each button. The digital drawings are editable in the Layers tab, so you can experiment without damaging your original photos.

Next, try adding sound effects during the 0.5 seconds that each button is pushed. Hint: One short sound clip can be dropped into the timeline below the slides to fit the photo, then duplicated for the other six slides that have a finger pushing a button (slides 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12). On slide fourteen, choose a sound for the robot to “reset” before it loops back to the beginning. Export your finished video with color and audio as an .mp4 file via the Share button.

eMotional Media
What happens when PETER’s buttons are pushed? The stop-motion animation kit is a guide for digital media and emotional literacy. Talking about facial expressions and the act of pushing buttons is naturally a part of this animation process, but what if it were a natural part of self-reflection? Try exploring my book PETER O’METER with your students to see how this eMotional robot navigates his emotions during his colorful robot-filled school day. Follow up with students after this lesson to check in on what pushes their buttons and what they can do to hit their own reset button.

Tricia Fuglestad is a K–5 art teacher, illustrator, animator, and author of the book PETER OʼMETER in Hoffman Estates, Illinois. fuglefun@gmail.com

Animated eMotional Robots