GuruBlog

For this animation I used a keyed-particle system and changed the time and the duration values for each stop.

I used a sphere and two cubes as my particle emitters. The first particle system is a particle system on the sphere with no physics to make the particles static.

Then the keyed particles move on to a particle system on a cube where the particles get moved my a forcefield.

Then the keyed particles move to the second cube where the particles again have no physics but are distributed in a grid.

And finally the move back to the sphere where they started.

you can download the blend file here