Thiruvananthapuram: The state-owned IT@School Project in Kerala is all set to empower at least 3,000 schoolchildren with animation movie-making skills.

Students in Class 8 and 9 will get preference in getting animation training, based on Free and Open Source Software.

K. Anvar Sadath, executive director, IT@School Project and ViCTERS educational channel, said the first phase of the training would be imparted to more than 700 selected students in the state next month.

"More than 3,000 students would be trained in animation during this vacation. These students along with the resource persons would in turn train their schoolmates in training sessions which would be held in their schools," said Sadath.

The training session would walk the students through the entire animation movie-making process, including identification of a story line, development of script and storyboard, drawing the cartoon characters, animating them, giving sound to characters as well as providing background music and creating titles for the films.

The Free Software based application - Ktoon is used in creating animation films.

"We all know, a normal animation course demands a huge fee from students and to practice it at home they have to pay huge amounts as license fee for proprietary graphics, editing and animation software. Here the course is absolutely free for students and all these packages and applications have already been included in the Operating System which was provided to all schools and teachers," said Sadath.

IT@School Project, the technology arm of the general education department Kerala, is considered the world's biggest simultaneous deployment of Free Software in the education sector. IANS