Start in 60 Seconds
- Open the game on a Smartboard, Chromebook, or tablet. It opens full screen in a new tab. Turn the sound on.
- Pick a grade level in the game. Students read each room's riddle (or tap the speaker to hear it) and set the clock and date plate.
- Launch the house. A correct answer unlocks a clip from The Skeleton Dance, followed by an Animation Time Capsule card.
Best week to play: International Animation Day is October 28, and the game begins and ends on that date.
What Is the Haunted House Time Machine?
The time machine is a spooky house with a clock on the front! Read the riddle. Put the short hand and long hand where the riddle says. Then launch the house.
If you are right, the house shakes and a dancing skeleton cartoon appears!
Did You Know?
This cartoon is almost 100 years old. It is black and white, and it has no talking. Just music and dancing bones!
Each of the eight rooms has a riddle about time. Students set the clock, then enter a date on the date plate. The year is given to them, so they can focus on reading the clock and the calendar.
A correct answer unlocks a short scene from a 1929 cartoon. After each scene, a Time Capsule card shares one fact about animation history.
Vocabulary
Animation: Making still pictures look like they are moving.
Students solve riddles that follow one long night, from eleven o'clock through midnight and the small hours to sunrise. Each room asks for a clock time and a date. In the older band, students work out the year themselves by counting back from the current year.
Every year in the game is a real animation milestone, from 1892 to today. Together the rooms trace how moving pictures went from hand-painted strips to computers.
Key Terms
Animation: A technique that displays a sequence of images quickly enough that they appear to move.
Milestone: An important event that marks a step forward.
How the Riddles Work
Every room has a clock riddle using hours and half hours. At half past, the short hand sits halfway between two numbers. Little dots on the clock show where it goes.
The short hand is between six and seven. The long hand points straight down.
Students get the same clock riddles plus a date plate. They enter the month, day, and year the riddle points to.
It's three days before Halloween. What's the date?
Students solve the clock and date riddles, then work out the year on their own by counting back from the current year. Ask them to predict the year before they type it.
It's three days before Halloween. What's the date?
If a Student Gets Stuck
A wrong answer shows which part to check, so students can try again. The hint button explains what the short hand and long hand mean. Before they move a hand, ask students to say where it points.
Eight Rooms, Eight Moments in Animation History
Each room's year is a real milestone. After each clip, the Animation Time Capsule card shares one fact. International Animation Day, celebrated every October 28 since 2002, marks the day of the first public animation show in 1892.
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1892The first public animation show
Émile Reynaud shows hand-painted moving pictures to an audience in Paris on October 28.
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1908Fantasmagorie
Émile Cohl draws a short film of stick figures that change shape. It is one of the earliest hand-drawn cartoons.
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1914Gertie the Dinosaur
Winsor McCay draws thousands of pictures to make a dinosaur that seems to have feelings.
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1928Steamboat Willie
Mickey Mouse whistles on screen in one of the first cartoons with sound that matches the action.
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1929The Skeleton Dance
Skeletons dance in a graveyard to music, in a cartoon from Walt Disney's Silly Symphonies series.
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1937Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
Hundreds of artists draw and paint every frame by hand to make the first full-length movie from hand-painted cels.
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1995Toy Story
The first full-length movie made entirely with computer animation.
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TodayAnimation keeps going
Animators around the world still draw, build, and use computers to make moving pictures.
The Cartoon Behind the Clips: The Skeleton Dance
Four skeletons come out of the ground at night. They dance and make music with their own bones! Artists drew every picture by hand, one at a time.
The Skeleton Dance came out in 1929. It was the first cartoon in a series called Silly Symphonies, where the music leads the story. Artists drew thousands of pictures by hand. When the pictures play fast, the skeletons seem to dance.
- It was made nearly 100 years ago.
- It is black and white.
- The music and the dancing are timed together.
Walt Disney produced The Skeleton Dance in 1929 as the first of the Silly Symphonies, a series built around music instead of recurring characters. Animator Ub Iwerks drew most of the animation, and Carl Stalling composed the score. The skeletons' bones become instruments, and the movement is timed to the beat.
Historical Context
The film arrived less than a year after Steamboat Willie, when studios were racing to master synchronized sound. Because it was published in 1929, the film is in the US public domain, which is why clips can be shared in a classroom game.
Last Question: What Kind of Time Machine Would You Build?
The haunted house is a time machine, and so was the rocket in our other editions. Now it's your students' turn to design one.
- Draw your time machine. What is it? A house, a rocket, a bicycle?
- Tell a partner where you would go and what time it would be there.
- Draw and label your time machine.
- Pick a date and a time you want to visit. Write one sentence about why.
- Write a riddle about that time that a friend could solve.
- Design your time machine and explain how it looks and why you chose that design.
- Choose a real date in history. Write a short script for a narrator who greets visitors on arrival.
- Write a riddle with a date or time as its answer, and test it on a classmate.
📚 Explore & Learn More
- Play freeze dance to music. When it stops, show the time on a paper clock.
- Make a paper plate clock with two moving hands.
- Draw a flip book of a bone-dancing skeleton, even just five pages.
- Make a classroom timeline of the eight animation milestones.
- Create a flip book and count how many pictures it takes to make one second of motion.
- Trade riddles with a partner and set each other's clocks.
- Pick one milestone and research the person behind it. Present three facts and one primary source.
- Storyboard a 30-second animated scene set on a date of your choice.
- Write a set of three riddles whose answers are dates, and swap with another team.