Computer animation is child's play for them
Tech-savvy primary school students enter IT programming competition
By Liew Hanqing
June 26, 2008

DON'T let their age fool you.


The girls from RGPS learnt to use the animation program over the June holidays. -- Picture: CHOO CHWEE HUA

These 12-year-olds can hold their own in the computer programming arena.

These Primary 6 students from Raffles Girls' Primary School (RGPS) are set to impress in the junior category of Code XtremeApps, an annual programming competition.

Organised by the Information Technology Standards Committee, an industry partnership supported by Spring Singapore and the Infocomm Development authority, the competition has a junior category for 12 years and below for the first time this year.

During the June holidays, the students attended training sessions to learn how to use Alice, a software tool which is the platform used in the competition, which started last year.

Using the program, they had to come up with short animated clips based on the theme of sportsmanship at the Youth Olympics. A total of 20 teams, consisting of students from 15 primary schools, are taking part this year.

RGPS is fielding four teams - the most from a single school.

RGPS student Teo Si-yan said the program was relatively easy to use. The challenge, she said, was creating sound effects that sounded convincing.

She said: 'We had to be creative. To create the sound of somebody hitting a volleyball, we simply recorded the sound of a basketball being dropped on a sofa.'

To vary the movements of their animated characters in the Alice program, the students had to enter different commands for each action. They also used commands to insert recorded voice-overs and sound effects into their clips.

The teams worked on their animated clips over the holidays to prepare for their presentations at this Friday's competition at Nanyang Girls' High School.

The entries will be judged on their effectiveness in conveying the theme, entertainment value, creativity, the programming code used and their oral presentations.

Miss Lim Chiat Hwee, the teacher in charge of the teams, said the school's representatives were chosen based on their performance in a school IT quiz where they tested the students on their knowledge of programs such as Adobe Photoshop and Microsoft Powerpoint.

'The competition is good exposure for the students - it gives them the opportunity to exercise their creativity in interpreting the competition's theme, and in creating their projects,' she said.

SAVVY
Most participants from RGPS are well-versed in other computer programs and applications. Four have represented the school in robotics competitions, which require basic programming skills.

Hope Chow said the basic principles of robotics came in helpful in creating her team's animated clip.

She said: 'To create a movement like waving, we had to split the movement in the basic components such as moving from left to right.'

Others found it relatively easy to learn the new program because of their experience with other computer software.

Student Farah Mok said she is competent with image editing programs such as Macromedia Fireworks, which she uses to create graphics for her website.

Her team-mate, Amanda Foo, has experience creating animated clips with clay figures. She is familiar with HTML (hypertext markup language) which is used to format websites. She also maintains her own blog.

Members of the winning team in the junior category will each get a Nintendo Wii, while the runners-up will each win a Sony PSP bundle.