Cartoonimator

Person holding phone up to a cartoon drawing of ducks on paper

Computational thinking has been identified as an important skill for children to learn in the 21st century, and many innovative kits and tools have been developed to integrate it into children’s learning. Yet, most solutions require the use of devices like computers or other expensive hardware, thus being inaccessible to low-income schools and communities. We present Cartoonimator, a low-cost, paper-based computational kit for children to create animations and engage with computational thinking. Cartoonimator requires only paper and a smartphone to use, offering an affordable learning experience. Children can draw the scenes and characters for their animation on the paper, which is printed with computer vision markers. We developed the mobile web app to provide an interface to capture keyframes and compile them into animations.

ACME Lab     Github Project

Infographic of how Cartoonimator works
Two people holding phone up to cartoon on paper
Children at a table watching person lay out a paper scene
Cartoon drawing of a skiing scene on paper, small paper cutouts have drawings of people skiing
Ink drawing of a fish with wheels on a small paper cutout, overlaid on an ink drawing of scenary
Person coloring cartoon drawings of ducks
Cartoon drawing on paper of a dog with a human face
Person cutting out small paper squares with cartoon drawings on them
Cartoon drawings on paper cutouts of fish
Collage of images of cartoon drawings on paper
Collage of people coloring or cutting out cartoon images, one image includes a computer screen showing a layout of these images

Associated Researchers

Publications

Krithik Ranjan, Peter Gyory, Seneca Howell, Therese Stewart, Michael L. Rivera and Ellen Yi-Luen. 2025. "Cartoonimator: A Paper-based Tangible Kit for Keyframe Animation". In: Proceedings of the Nineteenth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction (TEI'25). (New York, NY, March 4-7, 2025).

Krithik Ranjan, Peter Gyory, Michael L Rivera and Ellen Yi-Luen Do. 2023. "Cartoonimator: A Low-cost, Paper-based Animation Kit for Computational Thinking". In: Proceedings of the 22nd Annual ACM Interaction Design and Children Conference (IDC '23). (Chicago, IL, June 19 - 23, 2023).