Computer Animation as a Vehicle for Teaching Computational Thinking

Several platforms and programming languages exist nowadays designed and built to help educators introduce kids and youngsters into computational thinking. Some of them employ visual elements as the primary output of code in order to provide an immediate and engaging feedback for students. Computer animations, digital drawings and videogames are common products in these environments. With the rising popularity of animated films, children and teenagers may find more attractive to enroll in computer animation courses than in computer programming ones. Based in our own experience conducting computer animation workshops, we believe that this interest can be combined with the aforementioned introductory programming environments to introduce students to both computational thinking and computer animation as complementary subjects. In this paper we will present a general strategy to accomplish this based on what we call animation patterns.