[Bf-education] A kind of Lego Digital Designer

[James Riggall]

Have you considered using Minecraft?  It brings in additional gameplay
elements (such as mining the blocks) which may not suit your purposes,
but there is a lot of flexibility to modify settings on a local
server. It's possible that this wouldn't be a perfect fit for you, but
I recommend Googling it to see if it sparks your imagination at all.

James



On 19/11/2010, at 5:39, Edwin Pilobello <e_pilobello at yahoo.com> wrote:

> ----- Original Message ----
> Date: Wed, 17 Nov 2010 10:22:14 -0700
> From: "John R. Nyquist" <john at nyquist.net>
> Subject: Re: [Bf-education] A kind of Lego Digital Designer
>
> What a great idea for an exercise in seeing and translating that to
> Blender!
>
> Regarding your other question, what age group are we talking about? Maybe
> something like Alice?
> ================================
>
> I believe she teaches 2nd grade (8 year olds).  I'm not sure though.
>
> I like Alice and teach it every Spring term to non-CS majors.  Last time I tried
> to use beta-3, it had only one view.  So we fell back on v2.2 to avail of split
> screen orthographic views.
>
> For the design of the "game", I imagine limiting the UI to picking a block,
> coloring it, then moving and positioning it in 3D space.
> I'd take out scaling and whatever else one cannot do to a physical block of
> wood.
>
> In the "full" version of this exercise, the students get to build their
> inventory of blocks.  They have to choose the units, usually one BU to an inch
> and build all the blocks in layer 1.  When everyone is done modeling all
> the shapes of blocks in layer 1, then the fun begins. They each in turn, come to
> the front of the class to lay out a physical model for about two minutes.  They
> then have two minutes to copy the individual blocks from layer one to the
> assigned layer, duplicate as many as needed, then position each block to
> re-create the physical model.  To grade, I go to each layer and see how they put
> the virtual model together.  This is usually my first in-class exercise after
> they've learned to create basic block shapes.
>
> The "lite" version of this exercise starts with a blend file where all the
> blocks in layer one already built.  This was the exercise that the teacher's son
> got to practice in a "Talented and Gifted" class at a middle schools.
> _______________________________________________
> Bf-education mailing list
> Bf-education at blender.org
> http://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-education