Welcome to the Sliding Shapes lesson! In this lesson, you will learn how to animate smooth, straight motion from one side of the screen to the other. You’ll create a simple sliding shape (like a circle or square) using Wick Editor and control how fast or slow it moves. This lesson will help you understand how timing and spacing affect the speed and smoothness of movement.

Building on previous lessons in The Magic of Movement unit, you'll focus on even, linear motion. Think about how objects slide across a surface in real life – sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly, but always smoothly if the path is straight. You'll practice using frames and onion skinning to achieve this effect. Let's get started and make your shapes slide!

To begin, open Wick Editor in your web browser. If you haven't already, visit the Wick Editor website at https://www.wickeditor.com/ and click on 'Editor' to launch it.

Let’s start by drawing your sliding shape.

1. Select the Shape tool (rectangle or circle) from the toolbar at the top.
2. Choose a colour in the inspector panel on the right to make your shape stand out, such as red or blue.
3. Draw your shape on the left side of the canvas. This is your “starting position”.

Make it a good size, but not too big – imagine it’s something sliding across a table.

Now that you’ve created a sliding animation by adding frames manually, let’s make it even smoother using a feature called tweening. In Wick Editor, tweening helps your shape slide smoothly from one spot to another by calculating the positions in between keyframes.

1. In the timeline, go to frame 1 where your shape starts on the left — this is your first keyframe.
2. When you hover over the frame at the side, you’ll see a yellow line which lets you stretch the frame over a few other frames. Stretch this as long or short as you wish.
3. Next, click the first frame again. On the left, in the layers panel, you’ll see a diamond-shaped icon — click that.
4. Then, at the end of the stretched frame, click it and move your shape to the position you want.

Experiment by changing the number of frames between keyframes – more frames mean slower sliding.

Let’s try racing multiple shapes.

1. At the end of the canvas, create a finishing line where your shapes will race to. This is a fun way to see how the frames work with tweening.
2. Create 2–3 new shapes and tween them over different lengths of frames. This will make some shapes move faster and others slower, creating a race effect.

Don't forget to add a new layer for each shape. You can try this task again and again with different shapes or even objects that you can draw in WickEditor.