Teaching Blender to Children
CG Cookie’s Kent Trammell shares his experience when he introduces his 5-year old neighbor kid to computer animation.
My 5-year-old neighbor is like a lot of boys his age: Energetic, imaginative, loves superheroes/dragons/animals/cartoons, and enjoys learning. As a big fan of the “How To Train Your Dragon” films he was intrigued to learn that his neighbor does computer animation for a living. So he asked his mom to set up a time that I could give him a brief demo.
This was intriguing to me since I feel it can be difficult to explain computer animation to a 30-year-old, much less a child. Then again, I’ve heard that young children are better able to understand complex things (like a second language) than if they’re introduced to them later like high school or adulthood. My wife reasoned that the children she nannies commonly navigate an iPhone very well, even before being able to speak. Ok then – Maybe my neighbor, Emitt, would be able to grasp the concepts.
Good read! I couldn’t imagine anyone else doing a better job at doing a children’s tutorial(s). I’ve thought about this myself, but life seems to get in the way! Kent, looking forward to seeing what comes of this!
This is very cool! I started when i was 5 1/2 and now do stuff like this!
https://cgcookie.com/blender/images/bathroom-2-3/
I hope it turns out well!
(;
My children (now 12 and 10) have frequently seen me creating animations for my job using Blender. The eldest, when she was still at primary school, told me she’d been working on “co-ordinates, lines and 3D shapes” at school [vertices, edges, meshes!] so I showed her that Blender can do exactly that too. I have also shown Blender to my son. The reaction was the same in both cases. “Whoahh, that’s so complicated I could never learn that!”… and off they walk. Yep, it’s just the scary interface. They both happily use PowerPoint or Publisher unaided to create some very elaborate presentations, but one look at Blender’s interface is enough to scare them away.
So it seems to me that the best way to introduce Blender to children would be to use a set of graded themes and screen layouts:
Beginner: A mainly white but colourful interface that looks much like other software – e.g. Word or Powerpoint. Big buttons, and very few of them.
Intermediate:
Same colour scheme, but more buttons and a few more exciting tools.
Advanced:
Introduce animation tools, etc.
At the same time:
* Hide all the render settings.
* Hide all the world settings.
* Hide all the physics.
* Provide LOTS of ready made materials and textures to click on [constantly one of the most ridiculous omissions in Blender in my opinion].
That way a kid could happily sit down, add cube, add gold material… and start creating something, much like Lego.