There are few organizations in the world that can claim more expertise when it comes to storytelling than Pixar. The Disney-owned animation studio is known for its ability to consistently create…
Pixar has released lessons on the technical sides of movie making before, but these lessons are an emphasis on storytelling itself. This reminds me of The 22 rules of storytelling, according to Pixar written by a storyboard artist for Pixar. Some great insight into what makes a great story.
#11: Putting it on paper lets you start fixing it. If it stays in your head, a perfect idea, you’ll never share it with anyone.
I’m guilty of this… A lot.
#19: Coincidences to get characters into trouble are great; coincidences to get them out of it are cheating.
I wish more of Hollywood would follow this rule.
#6: What is your character good at, comfortable with? Throw the polar opposite at them. Challenge them. How do they deal?
#16: What are the stakes? Give us reason to root for the character. What happens if they don’t succeed? Stack the odds against.
Both of these are a nicer way of paraphrasing Kurt Vonnegut, “Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them — in order that the reader may see what they are made of.”
I doubt anyone would argue with the goals of making math class more joyful and playful, but those goals are more easily adapted to a poster or conference slidedeck than to the actual experience of math students and teachers. So what does a math class look like that responds whenever a student acts mathematically,…
In 2016, we learned more about how teachers feel about their profession, from the reasons why they started teaching in the first place (#1) to why they leave (#6). We learned that science students do better when teachers share stories about the struggles scientists face instead of portraying them as geniuses (#3). We’re also learning…
Get ready for Chrome OS to get a lot more pervasive and a lot more interesting this year, if only because it’s going to show up in new kinds of hardware. Google has been talking up the latest round of Chromebooks — the Samsung Chromebook Pro from CES and today’s new education-focused Chromebooks — but…
Recent research, collected by Android app Locket, monitored how many times its 150,000 users checked their phone in a day. They found that users did this a staggering 110 times a day,[1] whilst another study carried out by Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers found the average user checks their phone nearer to 150 times per day….
Primo Toys has created Cubetto, a wooden robot that can be programmed without a device, or the ability to read and write. Students program the robot with a series of commands on a wooden board, and the robot rolls over a special mat. It looks like a great way to teach coding concepts, which, in…
“Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.” Yoda may be talking about the dark side of the force here, but his Jedi wisdom is just as applicable to the dark side of social media and technology. Like the force, these tools provide…
