Animate a Basic Engine with Adobe Illustrator & Animate

Designed for educators, instructional designers, and digital content creators, this course offers a hands-on approach to building and animating a 4-stroke engine from scratch.

Utilising Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Animate, you'll gain the skills to craft interactive animations that enhance online learning experiences.

Whether you're just getting started with animation or looking to take your educational content to the next level, this hands-on course will guide you through the essential first steps of creating and animating custom visuals. Perfect for instructional designers, eLearning developers, and educators, the course begins with building a simple four-stroke engine using Adobe Illustrator. You’ll learn how to create clean, scalable vector graphics—an important foundation for animation work.

Once your engine graphic is complete, you'll bring it to life in Adobe Animate. We’ll walk you through the animation process step by step, covering motion tweens, layers, and timeline control. By the end of the animation section, you’ll have a functioning animated diagram that clearly shows the moving parts of a basic engine—an ideal visual for technical education or science topics.

But we don’t stop there. The course also demonstrates how to export your animation for various learning environments and shows how to embed it into common learning management systems (LMS). As a bonus, you’ll learn how to add interactive buttons that allow learners to control the animation—adding a layer of engagement and user control that enhances learning outcomes.

No prior experience required—just a desire to create compelling educational visuals!

What you will learn:

• Adobe Illustrator Basics - Master the fundamentals of Illustrator to design detailed engine components.

• Animation Techniques - Learn to animate mechanical movements using Adobe Animate.

• Interactive Features - Incorporate interactive buttons to control animation playback.