foolfillment: the blog

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.