12 Days of Christmas

12 Days of Christmas was a sister project to the online advent calendar Electric December 2000 offering a range of new work on a daily basis from 26th December to 5th January.

Throughout the spring and summer terms of 2000 Watershed worked with the Withywood cluster of schools in South Bristol – one secondary, one junior, one infant and five primary schools.

As a collaborative Art and ICT project 12 Days offered the opportunity to look at the web as a creative and expressive medium, using ICT for this purpose rather than as a tool for traditional educational uses such as word-processing, analysis of science experiments and to support numeracy and literacy.

12 Days introduced 15 teachers and over 400 pupils to the possibilities of 'web art'. Projects like this pre-dated the more sophisticated online interactivity that we are used to today and included simple animations, unfolding digital stories, clickable hotspots on pages, tiling of images, rollover reveals – a range of simple techniques that perhaps seem trivial now, but at the time were still new and a break from the basic information driven web of the day.

Working directly with the art teachers, who in turn worked with their ICT co-ordinators, each of the schools initially undertook some guided research to look at web art that already existed. Having researched possible techniques the teachers then chose one of the days of the traditional Christmas song the Twelve Days of Christmas to work on with their pupils. Using a range of digital and non-digital techniques the children created drawings, animations, cartoon strips and games, which were then digitised and published, online at 12days.net.

Even though 12days.net is over a decade old, its intrinsic childlike charm is still universally appealing.

Related Links:
Electric December