foolfillment: the blog

I wrote a wee while ago about having made an overlay for Google Earth of the schools I could have been placed in. Ewan picked up on it and the possibility for filling it up with all of the schools from an LTS database. At the time I realised I hadn’t made the file available but never got round to doing it.

Today it finally made it to the top of my list, so should you feel like populating it with some more then feel free to do so. I don’t know of a CVS system for these so either let me know of one, or leave a comment here saying if you’ve made any changes and where the new version is hosted and I’ll update this post.

Without further ado: (some) Scottish Secondary Schools. Currently it only has the location for secondaries in East Lothian, Scottish Borders, Perth and Kinross, Moray, and Highland. I haven’t even added in the addresses or contact details so there is a lot of work that could be done to it.

Update: New version with East Ayrshire secondaries included. I’ve also made it available on the Google Earth Community.
Scottish Schools 20/06/2007 (kmz - compressed version of the kml)

I’ll admit I was flagging a bit by this stage after a very hectc morning, I’m not even sure it that was his name - apologies if I’ve got it wrong!

John’s background (if that is his name) is mainly in teaching, he has been using parametric software since the early 80s. He now works with PTC in rolling out their Pro\Engineer software into Scottish schools.

Recently Pro\Desktop kind of ran out of steam. Now the big push is to get it’s big brother into schools, although John began by saying despite his PTC allegiance that he doesn’t care what software gets used - it’s the design skills that are important.

This presentation was more an overview of what PTC can offer and examples of work done with Pro\Engineer, it sounded as though the slides had been put together by PTC for anyone to present, as a sales pitch. John’s dialogue though made it more interesting.

A couple of key points he made:

Why aren’t we using Computer Aided Manufacture in Scottish schools? This was a point that made itself during Steve Stott’s presentation.

Indonesia are putting huge resources into their schools, they aim to be producing the best engineers in the world so they are putting in fabulous resources like rapid prototypers and lots of fancy software into every school, are we going to be overtaken?. I don’t know enough about what they’re doing, but as they say it’s not the tech but the teach.

I didn’t get much more than this. As I said, I was tired. ‘Diddums,’ I can hear you cry, ‘the poor student had to do some work.’ You’re perfectly right of course.

Chris Munro is a teaching fellow at the Aberdeen University Faculty of Education, involved with their equivalent of Glasgow Uni’s BTechEd. Until fairly recently he was still teaching in tech departments, he is also involved with the SQA.

I think time was getting a little tight so not the presentation it might have been.

The majority of the presentation was an overview of how Inventor and other modelling software can be used with the Product Design course. He worked through the three units and referenced the work he was showing against the Arrangement Documents. Starting off by explaining that when the course was being put together initially there was a vocal minority who wanted to make 3D modelling a much bigger part of the course than it is, they were challenged by the majority, including those representing industry. This formed the basis for his presentation - that Product Design has to be about creative design and not using fancy tools to create good presentation images.

Some of his examples of pupil work showed this brilliantly, the one that stood out to me was a sofa that had been sketched by hand, had gone through a reasonable design process, but in the final sheet of images the sofa bore very little resemblance to their other designs - presumably because they didn’t have the skills to model it as they had designed it. Somewhere along the way they or their teacher had decided that they should put in some 3d modelling because it would get them marks. It didn’t.

I don’t actually have much more to say than that, the overall presentation was pretty good - it’s nice to hear how the course was dreamt up and then to see how other teachers have interpreted the Arrangements. It was particularly useful for me as I’ve never had the chance to see Product Design being taught, it’s a big gap in my knowledge - possibly to change soon…

I didn’t take any notes for this presentation, so I’m relying on my memory and the over-riding thought is that it was fairly positive about the future by showing how not to do the course - the main point being to consider using 3D modelling to add worth to the designs rather than using it just because it’s there, I’d love to hear what other people thought.

The second presentation was from my course’s very own Eddie Mack with a talk entitled Driving the software is a start but where to next?

Eddie as I say is a teacher on the BTechEd course at Glasgow Uni, he’s taught in schools until very recently and has a speciality in graphics.

For me Eddie’s talk followed very nicely on from Steve Stott’s. The theme of it was getting started with using Inventor (or any parametric software for that matter) and moving along a spectrum of heavily led tasks to complete freedom for the learner. Eddie has delivered a great number of inservice days for teachers this year and thinks he’s hit upon a pretty reasonable order for introducing the software.

His premise was that the aim when teaching the software should be to allow the pupils to model/design anything they can dream up with little or no help, but to get to that stage quickly the pupil needs to be given a series of very heavily led tasks with specific instructions.
I’m not going to go through them blow by blow, mainly because I can’t remember them all, but it was roughly starting out by modelling some form; then adding holes; then adding dimensions/constraints; then introducing features like fillets and chamfers that can give a bit more interest.

He argued that to be truly free with using the software the key thing to understand is when and why you might need to create new workplanes, which most of the audience seemed fairly agreeable to.

This was another good presentation with lots to think about for next year. Unfortunately time was a bit short so there wasn’t chance to have much discussion afterwards, one big point though was the importance of getting away from teaching from a workbook that simply gives step-by-step instructions on how to create exactly the same object as everyone else in the class/year/school. Instead to find a way that suits you to teach the skills that allow pupils to model whatever form they can dream up. Aim to get to the stage where you can just release you class onto the PCs and let them get on with it and all of your teaching is to do with the subject rather than the software (which will change in 6 months time anyway).

Chris Munro followed up this talk and happened to have with him an example of exactly the sort of thing that bores teacher and pupils silly - a 40 page A4 booklet showing every step in how to model some artefact, allowing for no creative input from the pupil whatsoever.

I’ve got my fingers crossed that Eddie will put his slides on slideshare soon. If he does I’ll link to them from here.

First talk of the afternoon was from Steve Stott of Autodesk. Several of my year had seen Steve present a short session at a conference in Dunfermline last year, this session was an extended version of that. He has a background in engineering where he worked in workshops for around 15 years, he has also been a university teacher and a school teacher. His role now is with Autodesk - the company who make AutoCAD, Inventor, various other Computer Aided Drawing/Modelling/Manufacture products. The chances are that wherever you are you can see a product or building that was worked on in some wy with Autodesk software.

The main points throughout his talk were on trying to encourage teachers and pupils to get away from designing products by looking at existing products. To stop pupils going straight for catalogues for their inspiration. Rather to take inspiration and ideas from elsewhere and to change them into something different.

One thing that stood out for me was the superb quality of his images. He showed a huge number of drawings and photos of anything and everything, much of them at the start abstract things, beautiful shapes that could be anything. What do you feel? What emotion does this throw up? What is it? These questions so often just fall on their face in schools but with images like these the job is much easier.

He took us through a couple of products that he had designed right from the initial stages of looking for inspiration. One of which was a table top lamp which started out from images of starfish, another a toothbrush holder from images of athletes.

One theme throughout was the idea of an iterative design process rather than a simple linear approach. This is something I really agree with but is not something that easily fits into most design projects that are out in schools I have been in.
What allows such an approach in the way that Steve taught it is one of the big differences between Scotland and England - in England there is far more opportunity for computer aided manufacture (CAM). This in itself does not mean that an iterative approach couldn’t happen in Scotland but it does mean that in a project that is going to be made using CAM all the designing must be done before the manufacture starts, where as in most schools I’ve been in the design part is a folio that gets completed alongside the manufacture, thus removing most opportunities for creativity.

There was a big selection of the models he had made with classes, and a lot of images showing the designs evolving and these were pretty inspiring. They were almost all CAM made plastic models though and while they looked pretty good and showed a lot of creativity, I did feel that they were all a little too form based with not a lot of functionality. That’s perhaps a personal point of view, and maybe there were other projects that were towards the function end of the spectrum. He did take quite a bit of time talking about how he came up with the toothbrush holder and how it was made stable, but as far as I could tell (I didn’t get chance to see the model close up) it wouldn’t have been stable at all in the way he was saying. It would have been nice to see other models that had been made, ones with other materials perhaps.

I found it interesting that even though he was there with his Autodesk hat on he made very little mention of the products and showed very few screenshots of it in use with his designs. The majority of the design process that he showed us was of good old fashioned pencil renderings and annotations. This is really important because the designing is what’s important. We shouldn’t be throwing our pupils into a 3D modelling package too soon if they’d be better just drawing on paper - let their imagination be the limit to their creativity, not their ICT skills.

This was an afternoon of talks yesterday, held at the Faculty of Education, University of Glasgow. There were four speakers:

CREATIVE APPROACHES TO DESIGN - Steve Stott, Education Programme Manager, Autodesk Inc.

DRIVING THE SOFTWARE IS A START BUT WHERE TO NEXT? - Eddie Mack, University of Glasgow

BRINGING PRODUCT DESIGN TO LIFE USING 3D MODELLING - Chris Munro, University of Aberdeen

PTC, Pro\Engineer, Trialling software in Scottish schools - John Forth, PTC

I’ve written up some thoughts from the first two, the other two will follow soon.

I don’t want to make a habit of these short posts so I’ll try to make this the last.
I found out my school today - Ross High in Tranent. I’ll not say any more than that for now, I’m hoping to manage a visit on Monday and after that I’ll maybe have a firmer idea of what I’ll be teaching next year and how much blogging I’ll be able to get in. Afterwards I’m planning to make it along to the next edubuzz open meeting.

On an unrelated note I was at uni today for a session on Inspiring Creativity and Design with 3D Modelling, I’m going to try to write up some of the presentations here soon but it’s looking like I’ll be bust for the next wee while. I will really have to nag Eddie Mack (one of my lecturers and the organiser of today’s event) to get around to putting his presentation online using youTube and technobuzz.

I got my degree result today - a 2:1. Can’t complain about that can I?

Fingers crossed I’ll find out which school I’ve been placed in for next year in the post tomorrow too!

I had the great opportunity to observe an SQA markers’ meeting in Glasgow today.

It’s all very hush-hush, and I can’t say what was covered, but it was a really worthwhile thing to go to. There are of course lots of underlying issues about whether these assessment methods are appropriate, but for me as a teacher who is just about to start teaching courses that do get assessed like this, then being able to see how different questions get marked was incredibly useful.

I believe it was a very private process until quite recently which seems pretty funny, I don’t know what the reasons for it were but I think it is much better to make it open and accessible. One thing I wonder though is if being open about how different types of questions are marked might lead to teaching more to the exam than actually teaching the subject.

Another point that came up was that most Graphic Communication classes spend, perhaps, about 70% of their time on drawing boards, when only about one third of the marks comes from it, and more importantly after school the chances of the pupils seeing or using a board again are very slim. This is something I’ll come back to in another post. The spin-off from this point is the relevance and worth of the Graphic Communication courses in the first place.