SHIDONNI: Free, Web Based Drawing & Animation Program

Greetings,

SHIDONNI is a very “interesting” draw and animation program that’s free and web based.

Did the word “interesting” catch you attention? Good, because SHIDONNI is that and then some like, imaginative, amazing, creepy … .

Essentially, this is a cool drawing program aimed at elementary school kids.

What makes the program so amazing is the fact that the drawings can be animated.

One of the activities (which users are asked to do as part of an introductory tutorial) is drawing their favourite animal.

To give SHIDONNI a workout, I tried drawing a cat. (Give me a break! I can’t draw to begin with and I was using a mouse) When completed, SHIDONNI animated my cat and moved it around the screen. That was kind of cool.

Next, SHIDONNI asked me to draw my animal’s favourite food so I drew a bowl of cat food which I gave to my cat.

Notice that my cat is “eating” with the wrong end of it’s anatomy. The “ballon” with hearts is supposed to be coming from it’s mouth showing how much my meal was appreciated.

No doubt, the average 7 year old would think that mistake was hugely amusing but I found it creepy.

The user can then go on to create backgrounds and scenes for the animal to explore.

Once the tutorial is finished, users can then go on to explore a number of different scenarios where they can draw all manner of animals, people, space creatures, etc which SHIDONNI will animate.

That’s the good news – that SHIDONNI is a huge amount of fun to draw, animate and create digital stories with. It does however require each user to sign up for an account and that requires each user to have their own e-mail account for verification. A teacher wishing to use SHIDONNI with a group of younger students might want to check out the disposable e-mail accounts found in Phil Bradley’s Web 2.0 App List

SHIDONNI also has a teacher page with lesson plans and suggested uses. Unfortunately, there is no way I could find for teachers to create a “classroom” for their students so that students did not have register for an account. Perhaps in a future release.

In addition, there’s no way that I could find to save an animation back to a users computer once the animation was completed.

There are however ways to keep animations private and the web site claims that, “We monitor any creation that is being shared globally and at this point, we are not allowing any type of chat or messaging.” so the site creators do seem serious about child safety. In addition, there are also ways for users to collaborate and share stories.

Anatomical animation errors aside, this is a fun site and a great resource for digital story telling.

Check it out at:

http://www2.shidonni.com/default.htm

Enjoy