Pixar Entertainment teamed with Khan Academy to teach middle and high school students about how math and science is used everywhere. “Pixar in a box” will be 100% free to Khan Academy users. Throughout the lessons, users will be learning how math is used in the creation of famous characters seen in Pixar movies.

“Many students start to lose interest in academics because they don’t see how academics relate to things they care about,” explained Research group leader Tony DeRose at the Pixar event in Emeryville, California. He continued, “Pixar in a Box aims to address this disconnection by showing how Pixar filmmakers use these concepts for creative benefit in their everyday work.” Every Pixar in a Box lesson will have short videos explaining the practical use of the knowledge learned, along with interactive exercises and hands on activities.

One of the main lessons is how math can be a tool for creating images. In an event on the Pixar campus, Pixar President Ed Catmul stated, “We hope to encourage the excitement of learning and creative thinking for middle and high school students and to provide the tools to do it.” These lessons that are hosted by actual Pixar employees will give an inside look on what happens in the creation of a movie.

There are six main parts to creating a movie: environmental modeling, character modeling, animation, crowds, sets and staging, and rendering. In each lesson, students will learn how the processes are used in animating, and will be able to apply these tactics to their academics. This interactive “tool for learning” is meant to educate aspiring animators and story tellers.

Future lessons are currently being created for Art and Psychology such as how combinatorics are used to create crowds (like the swarm of robots in Wall-E), how parabolas are used to model environments (like the shrubs in Brave), and how simultaneous equations are used to paint all of Pixar’s images and will be available in the near future.