Hi,
I am looking to convince our cities central library to let a group of Home Educated (homeschooled) kids use their computers for some basic modelling/animation lessons. I haven’t done anything like this before, so I’m posting my draft letter here for critique, and requesting any advice or ideas anyone may have.
Has anyone else tried this or anything similar?
Dear Sir or Madam,
I am writing to ask if the Central Library would be willing to host a group of Home Educated children who want to learn animation.
We normally meet at xyz road Adventure Playground and members of the HELP (Home Education Learning Place) group start and run activities for the children.
However this venue does not have a computer room for the kids to use and as Home Educators we don’t have access to any school owned technology or funding.
If you are willing to consider the idea, we would need permission to install Blender 2.49 (which is very small) on however many computers, and have read/write access to a folder for saving files. Blender is mature, free software, documented and available from www.blender.org
All participating kids would be accompanied by a parent at the library.
You don’t even have to install blender, you can boot it from usbs or delete them after downloading. Haven’t read much else of the letter cause of dinner, but thought that might help already
edit: to add to my first sentence, when you unzip it it should work, so no installers or anything required, mentioning this might help, cause you don’t need to fizzle with installers and stuff, which somehow seems to scare some of the people that maintain the network.
I would mention the benefits that this could have, mention how the UK has a growing 3D game development industry (It was 3rd biggest in the world, until a few days/ weeks ago, when Canada ousted us), as well as film FX industry. I’m not sure how old the kids are, and I understand that this may not be that relevant, but it could spur a few kids on and they could really grasp the idea of becoming an artist/ animator.
I’d also mention how it’ll develop the kids skills, they will be using their creative skills, team building and communication skills and a whole host of other skills.
I’d just add those parts on, so that the person(s) looking over the request we see the benefits that the children will get from this, every little helps right.
You are quite right about USB, but I would rather try to get permission to use their hdds than rely on USB. I’ve got a feeling that USB connectivity is a source of concern to network managers, and my biggest fear is the library refusing on technological/safety grounds. For instance some web content is filtered there.
Which is the bigger risk to a sysadmin? USB or installing code?
‘creative skills, team building and communication skills’ sounds good. I’ll add that.
Hmm I’d have to say USB as they don’t won’t be able to check every one, where as if they install it they know what it’s doing, I.e. they can make sure it doesn’t access the internet etc.
yeah, didn’t think about that, although u only need 1 usb, to copy the unzipped files to a harddrive in order to use it, but forgot about those problems. But atleast you can offer both options
