Blender as a problem-solving tool in schools

Francisco Mireles reports about how he uses Blender in a high school class in Mexico.

I am pretty sure that most of us who use Blender ask ourselves now as adults, “Why didn’t someone teach me 3D modeling earlier in life?”, because that’s exactly what I thought when I became a teacher in Humane’s middle high school in the city of Leon in Mexico.

The name of this extracurricular class is Digital Creativity and what I want to show this kids is the freedom they posses now to do practically whatever they want with free resources. The way I work is doing everything in a practical way, for example, in this first 3D printing unit, I want them to materialize whatever they do in Blender with an FDM 3D printer.

My intention is to complement this curricula using only free or open source softwares, like Scratch for videogames creation, 123D Make for big projects’ building and DraftSight for 2D design.

My goal for this class is to set challenges for the kids, in order for them to look for a solution using digital manufacturing. Lets say a chair’s leg breaks and we need to design and 3D print the missing piece and, also, think of a way to attach it to the chair in a strong and durable way. Or what if we need to build a human size chess pieces set. Well, maybe we could 3D model the pieces in Blender, then, pass them to 123D Make to generate interlocking cardboard pieces to build them with out spending weeks 3D printing them.

Blender is a tool that has allowed me to work 3D and 2D designs, whether for 3D printing or laser cutting. So, with that in mind, lots of projects can be designed using Blender as a main tool.

And one thing I am sure about is that I will be learning more from these kids than them from me, we just need to give them the right tools and a bit of a push in the right direction.