foolfillment: the blog

Monday the 14th of April sees the publication of the draft outcomes for Technologies. I’m really looking forward to seeing what is in them and where we may be going, Technologies is such a broad name and it could cover anything we wanted it to, hopefully there won’t be a trap of covering everything - and in the end nothing to a reasonable depth. At the same time I hope we will not be sticking too closely to the ‘traditional’ view of technical where all we teach is how to make sawdust and filings, and instead we are able to position ourselves so we can teach at the forefront of advancing technologies and keep up with the demands of industry - whichever industry that may be at the time.

I also hope deep down that design will feature heavily in a way that will embed design into everything that we as technology teachers do, and also into what every other teacher does.

Awkwardly that date coincides with something else which you may, or may not hear more about later - although that may actually save my skin a little (anyone worked out what I’m on about?)

Image credit: Red Bridge - Originally uploaded by El Fotopakismo

Tomorrow night I’m giving the first of three sessions on Advanced PowerPoint. I’m not entirely sure what I should be covering, as almost all the people coming will have different abilities and requirements. To get around this tomorrow I’m going to miss out most of the actual features and options that the software has and instead talk about why you shouldn’t use PowerPoint!

Because I’m nice I’m making the slides available now for those people who are coming late or not at all. The most useful bits from the file are probably the accompanying notes but you can get away with just looking at the slides. Advanced PowerPoint Session 1. I should make it clear that some of the ideas covered are influenced by a series of posts from the Modern Foreign Languages Environment blog, the first of which can be viewed here.

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Clacksblog blogged about a couple of sites showcasing some beautiful work. They are amazingly simple, highly effective, and even strongly emotive pieces of art. Made from only single sheets of paper, they are well worth looking at.

Vanilla Joy and Peter Calleson.

Tonight I was looking around for some tips on getting the right proportions for a picture frame I’m hoping to make and found this instructables slideshow on how to make a frame. It’s well above anything we could do in a school workshop but it gets across the care and thought that has to be put in to any craft project. Instructables is a website I always forget about, but basically it is flickr but with the specific intention of being used to create photosets that tell you ‘how to’ do something. Some of them are fantastic, I should really get some of my pupils to make one.

And finally the other thing, who can find me a copy of Helvetica that I can play in the UK? It is a film about the Helvetica typeface (yes you did read that right, I want a film about a font) but as far as I can tell it is only available on region 1 DVD. I spotted it on Presentation Zen, a site Neil Winton tipped me off on the other night.

Having posted a week or so ago about trying to get my 4th years to be a bit more creative, my efforts have come around to bite me.

With Standard Grades being sat at the end of 3rd year at Ross High it gives us a whole 2 years to cover the higher courses. So far this is showing some good and some bad points. One of the good things to come out of it in the CDT department is the chance to overhaul the structure of some courses. In Product Design for instance we are giving the pupils the chance to be a lot more hands on and to actually make some of the things they design. This is great because the pupils get to see their designs right through from brief to manufacture and evaluation, it also makes sure they have to take the development of ideas through its full cycle and leave no details uncertain.

However that is causing some small headaches. The project they are currently working on is to design a promotional radio. The pupils are to design the radio and then create a pattern around which plastic will be vacuum formed, then they wire up a radio kit and mount it inside their plastic shell.

The class have come up with some really creative forms, the trouble is finding a way to create the pattern that the plastic will be formed around. The original idea had been that the form of the radios would be simple extruded shapes, and we’d be able to make the pattern from some timber or MDF - no such luck, I’ve tried to put together a rough model of one idea, I’ve probably simplified it:

This afternoon I posted this image on pownce asking for any advice on how to make it and Ian quickly came up with some good ideas. Of course that is exactly the sort of conversation that the pupils could have benefited from being involved in or even better, leading - my task is to get them set up on pownce sometime in the next fortnight or so.

The link above to my pownce post won’t work unless you have an account and are marked as my friend, but I have invites left if you want one.

I’m curious, I ask questions, I look at things and I wonder. I’m trying to get my 4th year Product Design class to do similarly.

Today we were looking at where they might get some inspiration for a radio they are designing. One of my favourite designers for getting conversations started is Phillipe Starck. The man is, quite simply, out of his tree. His work always elicits opinion. One thing I tried today towards the end of the lesson - out of my own curiosity - was to show them a picture of Starck’s Torche radio and get them to write down without discussion where they thought he might have got his ideas from.

I’d like to try it again here: without looking through any comments take a look at the image below and then try to think of an object, shape, motion, idea, or anything else that you think Starck might have had in mind when designing this radio. Once you have something skip to the bottom add a comment saying what you think his inspiration might have been. Then you can have a look to see what others saw in it - I expect most of you will have different answers.

In other news I’m a little disappointed that foolfillment didn’t make it into a list of 45 great blog designs - they must just not know about me yet (via Ewan’s delicious - everything I talk about at the moment seems to have come from there).

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.