Khan Academy with support from Disney, teamed up with Pixar Animation Studios to create Pixar in a Box. A free online curriculum that shows how pixar artists use the concepts they have learned at school to create Pixar movies.
These interactive exercises are engaging in different degrees of complexity by combining education and entertainment that identifies strengths and learning gaps.
Pixar in a Box
Pixar in a Box offers instructional online video lessons to empower learners while letting them study at their own pace, outside of the classroom.
01 – Watch the video of Pixar in a Box overview.
Participants can learn along the way a lot about Pixar’s filmmaking process and how Pixar artists use math to solve design problems during the stages of the creative process by particularly focusing on specific areas like parabolic arcs, weighted averages and animation curves.
Pixar production pipeline topics
There are already over 100,000 interactive exercises that can sharpen users’ skills from math, science through computer programming, history, art and economics with Khan Academy; and while these lessons are in the first phases of this project, with the first year primarily focusing on math, it’s worth noting that future lessons will target the above topics. Each topic begins with a design-focused lesson, followed by a math-focused lesson.
Topic overview
- Enviroment Modeling – explore how realistic blades of grass are modeled using parabolic arcs
- Character Modeling – explore how clay models are transformed into digital characters using weighted averages
- Building Crowds – explore how swarm of robots were created for WALL-E using combinatorics
- Animation – explore how animators bring characters to life with the help of Animation curves
- Sets & Staging – explore how virtual sets are constructed using geometric transformations
- Rendering – explore how pixels are painted by solving systems of linear equations
The lessons concepts are ranging from grade 4 through high school and beyond. These tools are free for all ages, from teens to parents and teachers. Khan Academy offers practice exercises, instructional videos and a personalized learning dashboard with a mission to guide learners from kindergarten to calculus using state-of-the-art, adaptive technology.