Blender appearance in UK national guidance for secondary schools
Blender is quickly becoming popular on schools in the UK – it now even part of the ‘Computing in the national curriculum’ guide.
Tom SF Haines writes:Blender appears in new national guidance for secondary (11-16) schools, which is sent to every school (all 3127 of them) in England. Download the PDF here and check out page 26. The actual text is vendor neutral, but Blender is proving popular in the UK – it keeps being used for winning entries at the University of Manchester’s Animation competition and is also used at the 3Dami summer school (3dami.org).
The model on the screen was actually provided by 3Dami for the photo shoot – we had a miniature ‘competition’ to decide what to use, under the constraint that it has to look like an 11 year old made it!
On the subject of 3Dami the final deadline for applications to attend this years summer school is fast approaching – 15-18 year olds in the UK with an interest in making a short 3D animated film in a week should check out our website. Deadline to apply and submit a (small) portfolio is 12th July.
My daughter is 12 and soon finishes her first year in secondary. To her, Blender looks too complicated to try, even though I showed her that Spacebar + 1 click makes a monkey appear! In primary school she already learnt about sides (faces), edges, and points (vertices) of 3D shapes in maths classes.
The only problem with our national curiculum in the UK is that it wastes a good 50% of every subject talking about ‘why’ instead of actually doing the subject (it’s the same in maths and science, which explains our poor results within Europe). Blender topic work will probably be spoiled by an hour of talking about it, an hour actually using Blender, and an hour of writing about what they did.