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

[Nicholas Jainschigg]

My mother was a teacher in the New York City public school system,
particularly in the (then) very poor neighborhood of Harlem. There are a lot
of challenges facing the kids in those areas, hence a lot of challenges
facing the teachers. I hope your Blender class gave the girl a context for
why it might just be good or useful to learn arithmetic, rather than make
her feel that it was useless to try.


On Fri, Apr 8, 2011 at 3:50 PM, Edwin Pilobello <e_pilobello at yahoo.com>wrote:

> 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!
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