Educator's guide

Imagineering in a Box is designed to pull back the curtain to show students how artists, designers and engineers work together to create theme parks. We take a behind-the-scenes look that learners love and make it an active experience through student-driven projects. We do this by weaving together videos and exercises into lessons that culminate in a long form project. The goal is to make students aware of careers they never knew existed and deepen their understanding of the process, concepts and terminology of the creative workplace.

This content can be used in a wide range of contexts. We think it will be particularly interesting for middle and high school teachers of arts, humanities, math and science. It can be used as part of a one week to one month long project that students can do alone or in groups.

Each lesson contains roughly 1 hour of video content and several exercises which build to a final project. To complete a lesson will take at least 2 hours or as long as a week depending on how much detail is added to the final project.

As in the workplace, all of our lessons are interdisciplinary. However they are focused in the following way:

Lesson 1 is art and design focused (all activities can be done with physical materials)

Lesson 2 is art and math focused (physical and computer based activities)

Lesson 3 is art and engineering focused (physical and computer based activities)

This lesson addresses the question: where do you want to go? It introduces the idea of experiential storytelling and the difference between an amusement park and a theme park. We’ll explore how storytelling and theme impact every decision made in the design of a land and how they engage all senses.

Students walk out of this lesson with a theme and high concept for a land of their own design along with a mood board and map that conveys the land.

This lesson addresses the question: what do you want to do in your themed land? It introduces students to the range of possible attractions within a themed land with a focus on dark rides. It exposes the importance of theme and storytelling in attractions in general. Following the creative development process at Walt Disney Imagineering, students envision and design their own dark ride. This includes both the artistic (beat sheets, models) and engineering (throughput, footprint) aspects of ride design.

Students walk out of this lesson with a beat sheet (bullet point summary), a digital layout and a physical model of their attraction.

This lesson addresses the question: who do you want to meet in your land or attraction? (Who lives there?) The lesson introduces a variety of ways that Walt Disney Imagineering brings characters to life and explores the process of character development through character sheets, performance, costume design, armatures, actuation and control (with a focus on animatronics).

Students walk out of this lesson with a character sheet, a costume, a simple physical armature design and a digital actuated armature.

Please let us know in the comments below or contact piab@khanacademy.org.

Check out Pixar in a Box for lessons on storytelling, computer animation, and more.