The 5 Rs: A New Teaching Approach to Encourage Slowmations (Student-Generated Animations) of Science Concepts

"Slowmation" (abbreviated from "Slow Animation") is a simplified way of making an animation that enables students to create their own as a new way of learning about a science concept. When students make a slowmation, they create a sequence of five multimodal representations (the 5 Rs) with each one contributing to the learning process in particular ways: (1) Representation 1--Background; (2) Representation 2--Storyboard; (3) Representation 3--Models; (4) Representation 4--Digital Photographs; and (5) Representation 5--The Animation. The 5 Rs help students to develop understanding of a science concept by encouraging them to create a stop-motion animation to explain it. (Contains 1 table, 2 figures, and 1 photo.)