Teaching Blender for Redhat High - lotsa pics

[Enzoblue]

This past week 3 of our very own Blenderheads got together at North Carolina State University to teach Blender. Groo(aka Fweeb), Jonathan(aka Mr_Bomb), and me(aka Enzoblue).

The mission was to introduce Blender to a set of 8th and 9th graders, continuing Redhat's philosophy of open-source involvement. Also, from what I gather, the higer ups of Redhat are concerned with a drop in interest in tech stuff for disadvantaged kids right in this age bracket of 12-14. This was a pilot program and they intend, if considered sucessful, to export this to India and some other places.

Michael Tiemann, (the guy who wrote C++), insisted that Blender get in the curriculum and contacted us here, so we went and took pictures.


This is the Redhat building we taught in, and a small part of the monstorous city that was Redhat.


The place was incredible. During a meeting with some Redhat people there was this cranky woman I talked to and I basically asked her how something so seemingly socialist as open-source got to be such a cashcow, (I asked in a nicer way). I honestly didn't understand how a software company that gives their source away and promotes open-source so hard could have a multi-billion dollar complex like this. She got snooty and later invited Jon and Groo to meet Michael Tiemann and not me, hehe. Oh well.


This is how we started our day. Me and Jon stayed in the dorms and we all gathered outside here and marched to breakfast.



Jonathan in our teaching room. He's 17 and from Kansas and is the best organic modeler I know. He would go into modelling mode and was so fast it blew us away. Even some redhat guys came by our window to watch him.



Isabelle! She wanted everything. Was like a sponge. Made a castle gate with guards.

James on the left made a squirrel wizard with a staff that exploded particle halos, hehe. Alex on the right made a tree complete with falling leaves.

Some of our kids. They were awesome and it was fun to get to know them. We pushed them pretty hard, (we only had 5 days at 3 hours a day), but they came through shining.


Relaxing after lunch.
There was also a photgrapher guy that shadowed us everywhere and we made the local paper in a big spread.


Groo! He was our leader and was even tasked with making a speech for a Linux gathering thing. He's also an amazing animator - we made a small animation for the kids and it was fun to watch him work. Smart guy. He kept getting introduced as an official spokesman for Blender, to the point that some thought we all were on Blender's payroll, lol. Groo had to play a fine line for sure.



This is Claire Sauls. She was hired to put this thing together. She seemed way young to me, but she had a very nice mix of fun-loving with stern when necessary. How could she be fun-loving under all this pressure you ask? Grace. She had it in aces. Everyone loved her.



The guy on the left is Vlady. He was the opposite of Claire, very stern and fun when neccesary. He and Claire had our kids wrapped up tight and when Vlady left us on the 3rd day, things began to fall apart for our heroine. I seroiusly hope Vlady and Claire get together some day, hehe. A nice match.
The guy on the right is Tim. He was the most layed back and very easy to be around. A good thing except when you've got 50 teenagers, hehe. He had to break out the whip when Vlady left though and everything went well.



James. Very fun guy and classic nerd college student, hehe. Refreshing guy.


This was Warren. She's and intern for Redhat and I'm guessing her real job is a supermodel. (!!)



This is Amy. One of those country girls with the magic personality where she can say anything and get away with it. My favorite quote from her was when a student came up and asked if he could have something and she said, very loud, "No. We love you but we don't trust you". Little hearts were popping over my head after that one, lol. PS- very very blue eyes, oh my.


And this is what happens when you get Blenderheads together:


Groo has a company, check his works at http://handturkeystudios.com/

Only day 2 of the caffeine collection.

Jon workin hard. He got 3rd place with Ecks in the last F1 competition, check it out.

Anyway we had a blast. Blending, teaching, blending some more.. fun stuff.

Most importantly I think we got some more Blender enthusiasts. These kids really went crazy for it and so did some of the Redhat people. I hope this Redhat program really takes off. You should SEE the looks on their faces when you teach them something new. Pure magic. They took to it so fast that the higher ups were stunned and so were the parents! I got quite a few heartfelt thank you's from them.

Thanks to Groo and Jonathan, you guys were amazing. Hope we can do it again next year.

- Enzoblue


EDIT: To see the work the kids did, go to http://sheep.handturkeystudios.com/

[henrymop]

This is awsome! I'm not sure were this was, though.

[mr_bomb]

Originally Posted by henrymop This is awsome! I'm not sure were this was, though.

The camp was based in Raleigh, North Carolina, US.

The greatest thing was seeing the kids putting together stuff that, when we were learning, we were still struggling with after several months; they had five days!

It was a great week and I wouldn't hesitate to do it again next year!

[gaurav]

Export to India huh?? I hope there is a better way of sayin it.

Can I have few more details on the course, permitting that you are allowed to do that.

-Gaurav

[mr_bomb]

Originally Posted by gaurav Can I have few more details on the course, permitting that you are allowed to do that. -Gaurav

The course was a week long set off into three hour classes each morning. During class the three of us, starting with the basic functions of course, taught the kids how to model, light, and render a scene from scratch; and in some cases animate it.
What the kids achieved in their five days of classes was absolutely astounding!

[gaurav]

Originally Posted by mr_bomb The course was a week long set off into three hour classes each morning. During class the three of us, starting with the basic functions of course, taught the kids how to model, light, and render a scene from scratch; and in some cases animate it. What the kids achieved in their five days of classes was absolutely astounding!

That sounds very interesting I had similar feeling/experiences last year when for the first time I participated FOSS.in.

Although you have written a lot about it already but if you guys want to write more about it we can accommodate it in the upcoming issue of Blenderart magazine. Just PM me.

[Fweeb]

Great post, Enzo! You beat me to it . It was an excellent week of working with some very brilliant students and two very talented blenderheads. I've posted some of the students' work on sheep-dot (my studio's side projects blog). Right now I've just got the stills up, but amazingly over half of the students actually made short animations. And we should actually give the students even more credit, because although they worked in blender for 5 days, the first two days were spent on tutorials and learning Blender. They did their own projects in just 3 days (including animation)! Simply amazing.

Once I get them web-encoded, I'll be posting the students' animations on sheep-dot as well.

Oh... and seeing as how we had the fortunate mix of two gifted modelers (one hard body and one organic) and an animator, we started our own little project. I'm sure there will be more on that later, though.

A couple of notes for detail. The camp had 52 students signed up. We had 14 in our track (3D Modeling and Animation). The other tracks were Audio, Video, and Web. Most of those were instructed by Red Hat employees, I believe. Open Source software was used in each track (Audio used Audacity, Hydrogen and one or two other apps I can't recall; Video used Cinelerra and Kino; and Web used Wordpress and the GIMP; we, of course, used Blender and Linux - Fedora Core, I believe - was the operating system of choice for each track). If you're interested in Red Hat High (that's what the camp was called), you can get more information on it at www.redhathigh.org. The "Linux thing" that Enzo said I spoke at was at a local LUG meeting, TriLUG. I spoke for about 90 minutes on Blender and showed Elephants Dream to the 100 (or so) people that came. That, too, was an excellent experience.

This whole thing has been a blast. I drove the entire 2.5 hours home with a big ole smile on my face.

[henrymop]

This whole thing has been a blast.

And you got to be with such pretty girls, too...

[Fweeb]

Oh... I also forgot to mention that the bulk of this was hosted on North Carolina State University's campus. We actually taught the students in a lab in one of their Engineering buildings. There was a slight incident when some nice NCSU students decided that it would be funny to change the passwords on the machines we were working on, but we (with the help of NCSU's and Red Hat's IT folks) were able to work through that relatively quickly and our students [thankfully] didn't lose too much work because of it.

[Fweeb]

Update on this. I've posted the animations the students made at sheep-dot. Go check it out. These kids did some excellent work.

[henrymop]

Woah! That spaceship one is awsome!

[DukeAndrey]

Wow that sure looked fun. I wish I could've been there.

Weird thing, I did attend a 4 day camp in towards the end of June. (Only internet thing I could find for it "http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:tsGmCOMikyMJrg.jsr.vccs.edu/caper/WordDocs/HighTechExpressSummary04.doc+high+tech+express+aca demy&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=1")

Fun with physics and robots and stuff, but unfortunately no blender but we did get to make a house in AutoCAD (I was the only one that knew how to render it )

Would've been a neat surprise if you were there Groo, since it was Richmond based. Oh no! Thread hijack, sorry!

Great camp, looks like fun, cool animations, and I'm sure we'd love to see more pics of Warren

[Peregrine]

Man I wished I had acces to things like this. I always seem to learn better when their is someone to aid me.

untill then i struggle along with the tutorials

[Jogai]

Hi,

I like such projects, i think it is spreading the blender use. Do you have some material you use in the lessons? Some specific books/tutorials/whatever?

gr

[Enzoblue]

Nope, just did it on the fly mostly. We decided to make just 2 tutorials, I did a doghouse and Jon did a dog, Groo talked interface and things to tie it all together. Our idea was to get them working on their own projects ASAP because they were due in 5 days, and we just walked around and helped after the first day and called everyone's attention occasionally to show a tool off. It's was mostly learn as you go though and that actually worked pretty good.

Didn't really write anything down, but Groo did make up a shortcut key printout and some animation workflow charts.

Edit: If I were to teach a class again I'd do a lot of things differently, but this was a first for all three of us. Next year we'll own it.

[bmud]

Hey doooods! I'm from Raleigh, and I would have loved to be in on this sweet event. If you decide to do it again next summer, I'm totally there!

fabmud at the "Google" mail

[Wizard]

So cool. I liked the animations that they came up with. Keep up the good work.