Brassica Butterfly Images and Animations Tutorial Home Page

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National Science Education Standard: Life Science Content Standard C
As a result of activities in grades K - 4, all students should develop understanding of
  • The characteristics of organisms
  • Life cycles of organisms
  • Organisms and environments
International Society for Technology in Education Performance Indicators: Prior to completion of Grade 8 students will:
  1. Use content-specific tools, software and simulations (e.g., environmental probes, graphing calculators, exploratory environments, Web tools) to support learning and research.
  2. Apply productivity/multimedia tools and peripherals to support personal productivity, group collaboration, and learning throughout the curriculum.
  3. Design, develop, publish and present products (e.g., Web pages, video tapes) using technology resources that demonstrate and communicate curriculum concepts to audiences inside and outside the classroom.

Audience for this lesson

The target audience for this lesson is science teachers for grades 4 through 8 (upper elementary to middle school). In Texas, this lesson is specifically targeted at fourth grade teachers. (select this link to understand why)

Rationale for this lesson

The rationale for this lesson is to utilize simple, easy-to-find, low-cost technologies to enhance the ability of students to visualize concepts in biology, specifically metamorphosis, a component of the life cycles of organisms. Time-compressed animations can greatly enhance understanding of the sequence of life stages, as well as enabling additional modes for student presentations.

Objectives for this lesson

The objectives for this lesson are:
  • The student should be able to visally map the stages of the lifecycle of a caterpillar to a butterfly on a graph of time.
  • The student should be able to discuss or describe how a butterfly changes in shape from its larval to adult stage.
  • The teacher should be able to execute a lesson with technologies appropriate to facilitate the student-centered objectives listed above

Materials for this lesson

The materials for this lesson are:
  • A computer with a USB connection that can support a webcam. (PC, Mac, or Linux as long as you get the appropriate software and webcam for your platform)
  • Webcam (USB version is suggested). Example: Intel Pro PC Cam CS 430, in many computer stores for between 70 and 80 dollars
  • Time exposure software for the webcam (many webcams come with this, as does the Pro PC Cam 430). Shareware like SupervisionCam can also be used.
  • Animation software to stitch the images together. (Spin PhotoObject, or free animation tools like Microsoft Gif Animator, available from the Internet by searching on the term "msgifani"). Another fine tool for converting an image sequence of JPG files into an AVI file is the freeware product JPGVideo from NDrW at http://www.ndrw.co.uk/free/index.html. Another powerful tool that will import images as layers and generate a gif animation is GIMP 2 and above from http://www.gimp.org. Macintosh users can use the shareware animation tools Gif.Gif.Gif or recent versions of GraphicConverter (available for download from Macintosh software archives).
  • Brassica Butterfly larvae and their associated materials, the Wisconsin Fast Plants (both available from Carolina Biological Supply at www.carolina.com). There is an entire website dedicated to these plants online at: http://www.fastplants.org.
  • OPTIONAL, BUT VERY USEFUL: A small tripod - often sold for digital cameras at computer stores. Cost: about 5 to 9 dollars. (Some webcams have a connection for a tripod, some do not. Others come with their own built-in platforms).
  • OPTIONAL, BUT VERY USEFUL: Graphics editing software for manipulating individual images. Paint Shop Pro is one of the best bang-for-the-buck options for Windows users. There is a time-limited version available for download from www.jasc.com. A totally free, and extremely powerful PhotoShop-style graphics software tool that is available on both the Windows and Linux platforms is the GIMP (Gnu Image Manipulation Program), available for free from www.gimp.org.

animated gif of a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis

Animated gif of a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis, generated from images captured using the setup shown to the right.

 webcam imaging setupThese images were acquired using an inexpensive web-cam. These USB devices are available for modern Macintosh, Windows, and Linux systems, and often include time-exposure software as part of the package. Figure on paying between 50 and 100 dollars for a good camera.
STEP BY STEP EXAMPLES
Spin PhotoObject logoSpin PhotoObject animation software (once provided free with many Casio cameras, but sadly, hard to find these days) is a quick and easy way to stitch the individual images together into an animation (including MOV Quicktime VR files, GIF animatins, AVI videos, etc.). It is by no means the only tool that greatly simplifies the production of animations from sequences of still images, but it is one of the easiest to use. Other (free) tools are mentioned in the list of materials further up on this page.
image link to a page with a training animation showing Spin PhotoObject See this page or click on the image link on the left to watch an online animation of the process of importing the individual images into Spin PhotoObject and generating a series of movies in Quicktime format. This page includes a step-by-step procedure for acquiring and animating the images.

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This lesson and all of its images were developed by and are copyrighted by B. H. Giza, Ph.D. © Last updated April 16, 2007