[Bf-funboard] Consistency and education

menuetm menuetm at stud.hfwu.de
Sun Oct 13 12:05:55 CEST 2013


Story/Background of that email (optional):

I'm an educator at the HfWU in Nürtingen, Germany and gave some courses 
for Architecture visualization with Blender.
Ton already received a PDF (Using Blender in a Highschool.pdf) of what 
we did in that trial to use Blender in our High-school. Because of some 
copyrights concern we don't want to deal with, we prefer not to make 
this PDF publicly available unless there is a real need for it.
After a meeting with the person responsible for courses, we 
investigated the possibility of proposing further courses for Blender. 
We looked at the latest version which is likely to be used: 2.69. I also 
heard a podcast from Andrew Price and Jonathan Williamson. Both are 
educators and have about the same concern as we have. As noted in the 
above mentioned PDF, some students did a really great job with Blender, 
however, too many just gave up (note that these students were 
volunteers, most of them are in the most motivated students we have and 
successfully learned other programs which are not easy to learn either). 
The ones who succeeded sometime did it in cost of their project quality, 
giving to much time to the visualization part, which is not the goal 
either.
Many factors are pointed in the above-mentioned PDF, but I come today 
for a simple question, that may decide if we teach blender further or 
not. As a public school, we can't afford to be elitist and we believe 
some relative simple changes may allow better success rates while not 
affecting blender's powerful work-flow and actual user-base.


The question :
Would it be possible to have consistent inputs integrated in 2.69 (or 
2.69c like consistency)? Our first concern is the select method. We 
don't really care if it's left or right click as we can change the 
default on our Network installation image, but we do care it's 
consistent (select, border-select, circle select, free-form-select, 
outliner, node-editor, etc...).

This is one of the biggest barrier we found in our feedback. We 
believe, as it's only related to key-bindings, that it may be included 
pretty easily as an option ("consistent select" ?) like left-click.
We agree with most of the consistency issues Jonathan pointed out in 
the podcast and would also be happy to see them resolved if possible in 
a 2.69 release, as we most certainly won't upgrade to the 2.7x series 
before it reaches the same degree of reliability the 2.69 version 
reached.

Sorry if my English is not good as it's not my mother language.


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