Kahootz
Encyclopedia
Kahootz is an education multimedia construction toolset created by the Australian Children's Television Foundation
Australian Children's Television Foundation
The Australian Children's Television Foundation is a non-profit, government-funded organisation in Australia concerned with the development, production, dissemination and promotion of children's television and other audio-visual material for children....

. Using this program, one can make 3D animations using the pre-made objects and backgrounds. It is used by many schools to teach not only making movies with the program but co-operation between the students.

Description

Kahootz was designed for children. It makes use of many colours, characters, movements and pictures. Many Australian schools have access to this program. In fact, the Victorian Government has bought the program for every school in Victoria
Victoria (Australia)
Victoria is the second most populous state in Australia. Geographically the smallest mainland state, Victoria is bordered by New South Wales, South Australia, and Tasmania on Boundary Islet to the north, west and south respectively....

.

Features

Kahootz starts up with a New Scene. A "world" is then chosen and characters and objects can be added in the same way as 3D Movie Maker
3D Movie Maker
3D Movie Maker is a program created by Microsoft's "Microsoft Kids" subsidiary in 1995. Using this program, directors are able to place 3D characters in pre-made or custom-made environments, add actions, sound effects, music, text, and speech, and then show these movies off to friends, family,...

. It is possible to zoom in and out and change the camera angle, as Kahootz is 3D, so it is as if you are in a real world.

Animating the object is similar to motion tweening in Macromedia Flash. A keyframe is created with the object in the desired position. A second keyframe is then created and the object is moved to the new desired position. One can then preview this with the convenient Preview button.

Many scenes can be put into a collection called an xpression. These small files can then be converted in QuickTime
QuickTime
QuickTime is an extensible proprietary multimedia framework developed by Apple Inc., capable of handling various formats of digital video, picture, sound, panoramic images, and interactivity. The classic version of QuickTime is available for Windows XP and later, as well as Mac OS X Leopard and...

 and AVI
Audio Video Interleave
Audio Video Interleave , known by its acronym AVI, is a multimedia container format introduced by Microsoft in November 1992 as part of its Video for Windows technology. AVI files can contain both audio and video data in a file container that allows synchronous audio-with-video playback...

 movies for viewing.

Community

A community has appeared online. Teachers and students can post their work online for others to view.

Kahootz Movie Maker

Kahootz Movie Maker is a plug-in to the program. It is used to convert into AVI (for Windows) and QuickTime (for the Mac).

Pattern Manager

This plug-in allows the user to edit the patterns pre-loaded into the program. Support was added for this plug-in in the 2.0.4 update.

Kahootz version history

The latest version of Kahootz is Kahootz 3, released in May 2008.

Beside other changes, it now offers more file formats for exporting created Xpressions.
  • 2.0.5 - March, 2006
    • Fixed a bug where Xpressions created by older versions didn't load.
    • Altered image compression settings.
  • 2.0.4 - September, 2005
    • Added support for the Pattern Manager plug-in.
    • Added support for "KTR" file extension.

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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