Interaction South America 2015

After several years conducting workshops on computer animation with Alice, a free platform for three dimensional computer animation created by Carnegie Mellon University, a pattern of styles of use was detected. It appears that participants in such workshops engage with the platform in one of four ways: 1) following instructions and copying the animation that the instructor is showing, 2) creating rich and visually attractive scenes with little or no movement, 3) inventing dialogue-based stories and placing characters in the scene to act them, and 4) scripting complex movement-rich scenes that use advanced features of Alice. In this paper we recount how we came to notice the patterns, describe the styles in detail, propose a process to validate their consistency across groups and events, and discuss why studying these styles could be relevant and revealing.