Red Hat High

I think the model for what we want to do with our high school Blender training is Red Hat High

What time frames do we need to properly train? Camp has the intensive portion that makes it most feasible.

Nasa World Wind

I work with an environmental law professor and a biology professor at UNC-Wilmington. They wrote an article for the Northwestern School of Law of Lewis & Clark College Environmental Law journal entitled '"One Man's Ceilin' is Another Man's Floor": Property Rights as the Double Edged Sword.' I took a diagram from that article and made it into a 3d model that could be used to visually demonstrate how seepage from one location to another underground impacts property and the same with the airborne pollutants which leave the property from which they were created.

I've been asked to help again with a re-doing of the diagram. I'm going to use Nasa World Wind to grab a real-world location and then model from that image in Blender. Right now I'm having trouble getting the same sort of image fidelity that I can get from Google Earth. I'm downloading the latest Java SDK to see if I can get some better resolution from a newer version or maybe I just need to poke around more deeply into how World Wind handles images. More on that later.

Understanding calculus through experiential learning

Current teaching and learning theory holds that including all of the senses in a teaching context increases the speed and depth of understanding in the learner.

In 1936 Claude Shannon was seeking his master's degree at MIT where he operated Vannevar Bush's Differential Analyzer. The differential analyzer was an analog computer designed to do calculus equations. The machine had to be programmed which involved translating the equations written by a given professor into instructions understandable by the Differential Analyzer. Through constantly revising equations to work with the machine Mr. Shannon was gaining a deep understanding of calculus.

Cut to 2007, computers are ubiquitous and doing lots of math under our fingertips but it doesn't seem to be seeping in like it did with Mr. Shannon. We are touching the machine as it works through the commands that do our bidding but we are not thinking about the process itself, rather just outcomes of interest such as printing a memo. Calculators have been around a long time and while they appear helpful to those using them to do math, they don't necessarily increase your understanding of math. The argument has been made that calculators are actually detrimental to the understanding of math because it is the process of working out the equations that yields the understanding.

How do we get the math in the computer to seep into the minds of children who need to learn math? Enter Blender an open source 3d modeling, animating, rendering, and game engine. The key here is game engine. Kids like videogames. Blender was designed for artists, not programmers. One of the features that makes Blender so interesting for teaching math concepts and increasing student interest in math is programming with what are called, "Logic Bricks." Logic bricks consist of a sensor, controller, and an actuator. Through these bricks you can perform many programming functions without touching a line of code. Python is the scripting language for Blender, and the Blender Python API (Application Protocol Interface) is articulated visually with the logic bricks. One of the actuators is motion. Motion allows you to modify force, torque, location, rotation, linear velocity, and angular velocity in the X, Y, and Z axis. It allows you to specify any of these changes in state to be either globally, or locally oriented.

This is math. This is math in the computer that we can touch and have seep into our brain. Kids love videogames, with this math kids can play videogames and touch math at the same time. Once a child sees that they can make the car go faster by increasing the torque on the wheels, they are off to the races.

Free PC Games - Many of them Open Source

Digg had this posted the other day. I've been digesting the contents since then.
http://esgameservers.com/freepcgames.html

The two games that I'm most interested in are:

Cube and Cube2

Free single and multi player 1st person shooter game with some satisfying fast oldskool gameplay. A large variety of gameplay modes from classic SP to fast 1 on 1 MP and objective based teamplay, with a great variety of original maps to play on.

Level editing has never been so much fun: a press of a key allows you to modify the geometry / textures / entities in-game, on the fly. Even more novel, you can make maps together with others online, in the unique "coop edit" mode (!)

http://www.cubeengine.com/index.php4

Battle for Wesnoth

The Battle for Wesnoth is a free, turn-based strategy game with a fantasy theme. Fight a desperate battle to reclaim the throne of Wesnoth, or take hand in any number of other adventures…

http://www.wesnoth.org/

Open Source Games - Pygame - Education

This site caught my attention this morning. (http://www.stoicmonkey.com/2007/01/gpl-vroom-for-linux/.) It looks like good stuff. The way I landed there was from the pygame site. The game is a lot of fun. My son played it for half an hour last night.

The best thing about these games in my opinion is that I can read how they are programmed. Slowly the methods of programming are seeping in as I read them. What a great collection there is out there of good code. Most of the classic game genres are covered. Just some slight tweaking and most of these games can hold educational content.

I'm looking to be the tweaker and then pass the tweaking off to public school teachers and students.


I found another interesting site.

Open Source Education Software by Charles Cossé
http://www.asymptopia.com/

Edge Loop Selection in Blender

Edge loops. Yeah, those.

Edge loops are like when I first started learning photoshop and had a conceptual problem with layers. I have know that I want quad based modeling for ease of manipulation, proper animating, and good results with sub-surfacing.

However, I am not formally trained in modeling and my work in the past is not to the standard I'd like to achieve. In watching modeling training videos I'm seeing the edge loop tool select being used. I'm not able to successfully follow along. It isn't working for me. I'm hitting ctrl-e 6 like they are telling me but nothing happens.

This morning I look up in the blender wiki manual edge loops and voila! Like magic. Hold and and right click. All the cool edges in my forming skull model are selected nicely. Joy.

http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Manual/Edge_and_Face_Tools

Science and Education as Exploration

John Gage, who is a Sun Fellow and researcher -- published his Ph.D. thesis, Sketchpad, which founded the field of computer graphics and computer-aided design. Had this to say about the relationship of science and education.

Science and education are both forms of exploration. The same tools that are used for scientific exploration should be in the hands of students in schools, so that they can explore the world around them from the earliest age. We're seeing that today with four-year-olds playing on their Macs and interacting with visual and auditory environments. And that exploratory environment is a form of education, which is truly lifelong.

http://onesearch.sun.com/search/onesearch/index.jsp?qt=sketchpad&charset=UTF-8

Scientific visualisation and computer gaming are pretty much the same thing. The best games play with aspects of science. Civilization...Political Science and History. Marble Madness...Physics. The whole of it wraps right into one of my favorite sciences, art. Both create computer generated user interacted with art. Teaching is an art. Art is a science. Teaching art is a science, teaching science is an art.

We need to get computer programs more complicated than the current round of teachers understands into the classrooms at early ages. The students need to be playing games that they can modify. Put their picture on the character, change gravity. The montessori counting blocks of the 21st century. Blender
is the tool for the job. Children will learn it quickly. I've taught a 13 year old for one hour and he started making school projects that blew his teacher's minds. My son is nine and he watches me model and plays the games I make. Rather the games we make. He is artistic oversight, and gameplay advisor. My three year old son loves to play my driving game. As time permits I'm gonna put in the letters of the alphabet with sounds when you bash them.