Papimation: A Symbol System for Children to Animate Their Drawing.

Drawing for children is an intuitive way to express themselves. But the static property of paper drawing and children’s shortage of expressive words limit them. Animating children’s drawings could break the static state into a dynamic one and help them to convey ideas. However, the complex animation process is difficult for children to understand and correctly use. So, in this paper, we present Papimation, an animation symbol command system for children to achieve animation effect on their drawing by themselves. We conducted three user studies to design and evaluated it. Progressively we investigated the possible motion that children intent to achieve, generated understandable and accessible animation symbol command vocabularies for children, and evaluated the feasibility and enjoyment of our system. Results show that children achieve high agreement in our system and could learn and use them with ease. Our system gave more play to children compared with only drawing.