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

[Jon Wood]

Edwin
I have teaching experience too and the beauty of digital 3d modelling is that it can build the cognitive links. Moving over time and space - approaching the theory of relativity! So she couldn't count to ten, but i hope you didn't give up with her. 3d modelling is a great way to really stimulate number skills in kids 
jon

Date: Fri, 8 Apr 2011 18:29:17 -0400
From: njainsch at risd.edu
To: bf-education at blender.org
Subject: Re: [Bf-education] Intro to Blender 3D class for teens

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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