foolfillment: the blog

This year at Ross High we’re hoping our Higher Graphics Class will be producing some really cool stuff for their Thematic Presentations (a folio of different types of graphic work based around a single artefact) with a suggested theme of Lego toys. To get them started I’ve modelled a wee man with the intention that they can use him in their own work - with modifications of course.

For the course they will need to do a series of manual and computer generated drawings. One way of doing the computer drawings is to actually model the object in 3D like I’ve done above then get very accurate and detailed drawings generated from that. I’ve used Autodesk Inventor but if you want a shot of doing something similar yourself then Google Sketchup is a free programme that does similar things and comes highly recommended for all abilities.

What you see above is me just going that little bit further so that the class can see what is possible outwith the requirements of the course, animations are a fantastic way of really showing off a piece of work and can be quite good fun to make - unfortunately they aren’t currently assessed/assessable.

This example needs a lot of tidying up, but it is just a little bit of fun and (I think) quite cute.

Incidentally this took me around 2 hours to model and a further 1 at most to set up and tweak the animation. The bit that took the time was rendering the animation, around 450 frames, which took about 60 minutes for 30s of animation.

I visited Prestonpans Primary School today and I was taken amazed by what I saw. This was the first time I’ve been in a primary school since I was a pupil myself so I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect, but I was fairly certain that I’d see teachers there showing me a thing or too about how to deliver great lessons: learning intentions shared along with negotiated success criteria, all the pupils active and collaborating; and colourful classrooms that are exciting places to be. This is almost exactly what I saw, I’m shattered now and I didn’t really have to do much - turns out observing in a primary school is a much more involving event than observing in a secondary. The energy that all the teachers put in to their lessons and the enthusiasm from the pupils was quite staggering, and I should take the chance to say a huge thank you to all of the staff who let me take part in their day.

Somewhere along the way from primary to secondary there seems to be something that removes so much excitement about learning, that stifles the boundless creativity that children have. I’m going back in to school tomorrow with a fresh determination to make every lesson count. Something that I find difficult in my subject area is making every lesson count in it’s own right as a learning experience. So often what I am working on with my classes is a project that spans over more many lessons, where the learning comes from practising practical skills, or where because of resources pupils all work on different things on different days, this makes teaching things to a whole group in 1 50 minute slot near impossible.

Something that was said to me the other week was that Graphic Communication is one subject where you can really work on your teaching skills, it is the subject where you can work on much smaller pieces of work and have a lesson dedicated to each part. It offers challenges to explain difficult concepts and procedures to a variety of different abilities. This idea came up because I was delighted to have regained an S2 Graphics class, I was sharing them on my original timetable back in August but lost them for a while when the timetable changed a few months ago. Thankfully I got them back the other week and I am thoroughly enjoying taking them again, I hope they are too! Now the challenge is to make every lesson with them count, to share those learning intentions better…to have them more active too I hope, I have some plans for this which you may see on the RHS CDT blog (if technology doesn’t let me down).

I’m hoping to use flickr tomorrow - it may not work depending on the school’s internet connection. The lesson will be an exercise introducing Assemblies in Inventor, a 3D modelling package. I’ve put together a few screenshots of the exercise the class are to do and then given instructions alongside them in a new photoset in flickr. Just so you can share in the joy of learning about constraints I’m going to make it all available here. I’ll make the files needed available here too and also put together a powerpoint with the images in case you can’t access flickr at your school.

Here is the flickr set, it’ll work best if you view it as a slideshow.
Here are the Inventor Parts you will need.
Here is the powerpoint in ppt format.

I’m also going to make the photos open for comments and notes and encourage my class to make use of that - will they take up the chance of an audience? (unfortunately I think it might only be a few as it requires them to be a flickr member - boo!)

I’m on the look out for a camera/camcorder/webcam that I can use in my Graphic Communication classes and would like any advice/ideas people might have.

The idea is that it will be rigged up over a drawing board with the output displayed through a digital projector. How it works is open.

Ideally it will perform well in varied lighting conditions and will have an AV output.

Any suggestions? Could I go with a swish webcam and run it through a PC without losing too much quality? Or I could try to find a compact digital camera that runs from mains and doesn’t turn off automatically when no buttons get pressed for a while? Or should I just try to find the wee bit extra cash to get a cheapish DV Camera?

Or, does anyone have an expertise in making pinhole cameras?

I am trying to deal with a question that has been eating away at me: What is the point of Graphic Communication? Literally graphic communication is enormously important, sending and receiving information in graphical means is something that I think everyone needs to be able to do. To me though as a subject taught in Scottish schools it is lacking enough relevance and coherence. I must immediately follow that up with this: I really enjoyed sitting the subject and I really enjoy teaching all aspects of it. I enjoy the course, I just feel a little ill at ease with it and in this post I’m trying to work out why and to illicit some response.

This post is longer than most of my usual ones so I’ll try and reel you in with some questions. I hope they are contentious enough to make you read on!
Why do we bother teaching orthographics?
Why on earth do we teach oblique parallel?
Why don’t we just bin all of our drawing boards and just take all drawings from computer generated models?
Instead of building up a folio of pre-selected drawings why don’t the pupils select what they think are the appropriate drawings?
Why is it not based around a theme of design?

Any of those started you grumbling?

For the sake of focussing discussion a little I’m going to look at the Standard Grade, these are the areas of the course content roughly (crudely?) summarised:

use of drawing instruments
reading and interpreting drawings
different line types for illustrating different things
how to sketch/draw different shapes and forms in different views
dimensions;
effective use of scale
recognising and using common graphical symbols
2D computer draughting, including text and common representative symbols

display of information - creating/interpreting graphs and diagrams
colour theory - demonstrate effective use of colour, justify choice
effective use of variety of media - colour pencils, markers, pastels
layout and lettering - achieving visual impact, Desktop Publishing, page layout
modelling - in card or paper or other suitable media

state the advantages/disadvantages of Computer Aided Drawing
identify and understand the function of various pieces of computer hardware
demonstrate a knowledge of graphic software packages

You might have noticed I’ve grouped them together a little. At the top is the content covering drawings; then a section that covers communicating information; then a section of what are, in my view, discrete facts to be regurgitated.
These three sections roughly relate to the three assessable areas which are supposed to have equal weighting, but you will see that the section on drawing has a lot more content than the other two (I said my summary was crude!) which leads me to one of the things I want to talk about : Why do we spend so much time on manual drawing methods? And why do we spend so much time on drawing types?
Another thing I want to discuss is how 3D modelling should fit in to the course. It is a bone of contention for a lot of people, but the software is here and it is changing things outside of school, should we not try to keep up?

Why do we spend so much time on manual drawing methods?
And why do we spend so much time on drawing types?

Perhaps around 70% of time in Standard Grade is spent teaching pupils how to create drawings using manual instruments, only around one third of the available marks come from this.
This could mean certain things
- the manual drawing is too hard/other areas are too easy for the marks available
- we are wasting our time and disadvantaging the pupils by not teaching the elements equally
- or the manual drawing skills pervades everything else, while we only assess part of it directly

So why do we teach manual graphics so heavily? What are we aiming for with this course? Is it to: produce young people who can draw a perfectly neat and accurate pencil representation of an artefact from a given view? Or is it to produce young people who are equipped to communicate ideas to and from other people in a variety of ways, and who are able to select the most effective method of communication, beit graphical or otherwise?
The latter has to be the aim for the course, for that reason my view is that the emphasis on manual technique is too great.

By all means teach the different types of view, but do it quickly and explain that very often they are of limited use. Explain that depending on the situation people illustrate things in different ways. Spend time on the technical drawing types that are of most use and explain why. Teaching the skills to create these drawings is important, it improves anyone’s ability to get ideas across, but teaching how to pick and create appropriate methods of communication allows for much more.

We should be furnishing the learners with the skills that will allow them to communicate ideas effectively in a variety of ways - teach the theory of presentation as well as the skills. Why spend ages on the terminology of DTP packages, or the many different types of site plan, garden layouts, maps, circuit diagrams? Instead get across the importance of clear layout, clarity of information, visual impact, colour theory, font selection, appropriate scale. Get across the bits that really matter to every situation instead of trying to cover every situation and stating the bits that matter. (I suppose this argument is similar to the one about why geography teachers have to spend time teaching all the symbols on a map when a map comes with a key)

The aim of the course has to be to give the pupils the skills/understanding of how to communicate effectively in their lives after school, not to give them discrete knowledge about things that in all probability they won’t come across.

So how do you do this? Well, how about through a folio of work? Each pupil could be given a brief: They are to create a series of items that communicate certain ideas to certain people. Who decides who these people are shouldn’t matter, perhaps the pupils select the audience, perhaps they are given a list to choose from - the idea has to be that the pupil has the task of communicating information to a range of groups of people. They would select and design the most appropriate methods to do that, and justify why.
The folio as it stands puts emphasis on using certain predetermined types of drawings and graphics, this would instead put the emphasis on understanding methods of communication without dropping the skills required to produce the drawings and graphics.

The question about why we spend so much time on manual boards teaching orthographics leads me directly to my next question:
How should 3D modelling packages fit into Graphic Communication?

Why do we spend so long using manual techniques when there is only a very small chance that anyone will use a drawing board outside of a school? (Am I right in saying this?) Why shouldn’t we just start teaching orthographics using a CAD package? Going further, why do we bother teaching orthographics at all? I think that is the question that will rile some people. I’m not actually suggesting that there is no place for drawings of certain views. What I am getting at is this : Is there an actual need to learn how to draw orthographic views anymore when you can make a computer model of an object and then generate any view from that?

I can understand that there is a need to be able to interpret drawings, but do you need to draw these drawings to be able to read them? If the skill is to interpret the drawings could we not give out a set of drawings and get the pupils to model them?

There is a danger though of the course becoming a ‘How to use Autodesk Inventor/Pro-Engineer/etc’ which in my view wouldn’t be desirable. How could that be avoided? What about bringing into the course a strong element of design? Have the pupils design an artefact to fit a brief, then model it and create a folio of drawings to present it to a client? Does this sail too close to Product Design? Is it be a bad thing if it does?

That’s where I’m going to leave it. What do you think? How do you feel about the courses as they stand? Please comment with your thoughts, I’d love to hear them so please comment and encourage others to do so as well.

One last point - please don’t be too negative, we can often be too quick to moan in this country, let’s instead be enthusiastic and constructive. As I said at the start I really enjoy graphics, and I’d like to make it better for the young people who sit it.

Ok, go!

I’ve had a post brewing for a while, I wanted to gauge opinion before I posted it though.

First of all, I really liked the course when I sat it, I enjoy teaching all of the aspects of it. All of the time though I have a nagging question eating at me: what is the point of Graphic Communication?

I have a few reservations about the course’s relevance to the people who sit it. I’d love to get involved in a discussion about its future, its validity in today’s world, the appropriateness of its content.

If you have any opinions about the course please get in touch. I’m going away for a week on Saturday so there won’t be much noise from me until after that but I’d still really like to know if there are any strong opinions out there.

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.

So, I was in uni today, talking with my supervisor about my project (it’s going okay, thanks) and we got talking with the course leader, who shares the same office, about the future of subjects in CDT. More and more schools are going down the route of teaching only Craft and Design, and Graphic Communication. The point that came up was that these subjects are the ones that are (apologies if this hurts any of you) easy to teach and easy to learn. This is because essentially these courses only offer up skills, there is not really any academic aspect to them, they require pupils to learn how do perform some tasks but do not require much understanding or learning to occur.

This post is a bit of a ramble and there are no fully thought out ideas here, so feel free to chip in with your ideas of CDT, or to tell me that you disagree. It’s likely I will edit this if I get more of an idea of what I think should happen.
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