[Bf-education] Intro to Blender 3D class for teens

[Edwin Pilobello]

Starting up an Intro to Blender 3D class for teens tomorrow.  It'll be a 3 
hour class for 5 Saturdays at Portland State University.

I'm going to start this class off like I fell into when using laptops without 
numeric keypads.  I'm going to skip the keyboard shortcuts.  It seemed to reduce 
cognitive load by just using the mouse to choose options over remembering 
shortcuts and using two hands.  I believe they would really appreciate shortcuts 
later after they've absorbed the basic concepts of 3D objects and manipulation.

My last class at a Title I school (at least 70% of the student in the free lunch 
program) gave me a lot of challenges.  There was one 5th grade girl (~11 years 
old) who was having a lot of difficulty animating a ball bouncing off a block  
The rest of the class made relatively quick work of positioning the ball, 
inserting a keyframe, moving the ball, inserting the next keyframe and reducing 
the height and interval until the ball came to a rest.  After a lot of effort to 
try to help this girl understand and do, I finally decided to play a counting 
game.  We were to alternately count off even numbers.  She couldn't make it to 
20!!!  She couldn't get past 10 when counting by 3s.

The rest of the class just shook their heads.  I was somewhat dumbfounded to 
discover an 11 year old with very little number sense.  So moving something over 
time and space was way beyond her comprehension.

Oh well!