Overview

The Pacific School of Innovation and Inquiry (PSII) is an independent high school located in Victoria, BC, offering a truly personalized education. Through a formal inquiry process, learners at PSII develop interdisciplinary pathways leading to learning activities that take them through a curriculum of their own.

PSII was the first inquiry-based school and is the first high school to use inquiry-based learning in Victoria, BC. Explaining this new way of learning in a school setting can be challenging, but PSII took on this challenge. The world needs an update on education and PSII is pursuing inquiry-based learning as the alternative.

Our mission for this project was to help explain to the community of Victoria the importance of this learning model and how it can help students be more prepared for the world.

Research

Jeff Hopkins, the Principal and Founder of PSII, originally contacted me to create posters to explain the inquiry process, but given the goal was to save time and provide a quick and easy way to share the inquiry process, we determined that posters would not achieve this goal. An animated approach would be better suited. Spending more than 2 hours a day was time consuming and the founder needed a solution.

Through our discussions, we identified the target audiences and what information was needed to be in the animation. This would allow us to plan how long the video needed to be. If the animation was too long it could deter people away from watching it, in order to prevent that we both decided that it should be around two minutes. With the two minute time limit set, the information that was most important to include in this animation was the 5-step inquiry process.

The audiences we were targeting were: parents who are considering their children to go to PSII, teachers and educators in the government interested in learning more about inquiry.

Sewing It Together

The purpose of this animation was to get people excited about inquiry, enough for them to want to research it more. After creating this plan, we developed a script for each part of the inquiry process that later on a student at the school would narrate.

While the script was being written, a storyboard for each scene was developed. My goal was to make sure that people watching the animation would understand each step of the inquiry process, even without the narration. The storyboards had to be illustrated and animated separately before being sewn together. We built the storyboard with the expectation that we would have a narrator explaining the more detailed points that the animation could not. After many discussions, we determined that having a learner at PSII do the narration would be the perfect fit, especially since the learner's personal inquiry was voice overs and acting.

The fun and playful characters and design was chosen to showcase the values and atmosphere at PSII. The school is a supportive, fun and adventurous place as every student learns in their own way, which allows for an adventure every time you walk through the door.

Throughout this process, we received feedback from teachers, students, and other educators in Victoria. This allowed us to make sure we had everything needed in order to explain the process.

The Result

Together, through the help of the teachers and students of PSII, we created an animation that helps explain the uniqueness of the inquiry model. This will provide a digital explanation for inquiry that PSII can distribute to people if they are interested in learning about it. The animated video has been a success in terms of people understanding the model through watching it. The most important goals this animation achieved are saving the founder time everyday, allowing for an easy to share resource to showcase inquiry-based learning in a narrative format, and a way to spread the model to help other schools.