There were several reasons for being interested in computer animation for education:
- Flexibility: many educators were attracted by the possibility of writing your own short films to give their own slant on a particular topic. Some even thought that it would be possible to produce an animation in time for the next lesson in a course.
- Speed: the BBC/Open University were just starting to produce courses for presentation on TV. There was a need to generate possibly 20 minutes of simple animations a week for new courses
- Alternative Teaching Aids: a different approach to teaching a course or topic could be made with access to novel aids to teaching
- Cost: the dream would be your own animations that were low in cost and easy to update
A good introduction early on was Ed Zajac's 1965 paper Computer Animation: A New Scientific and Educational Tool .
The 1969 paper Computers in the Science Curriculum by Ronald Blum and Alfred Bork surveys the types of computer usage, both current and planned, in science education.
Ronald Blum's 1968 paper Notes on "Image Methods in Electrostatics" (A Computer-Animated Film) describes producing a computer animated education film in Physics.