 Today we want to talk about Blender for school age kids. I'm curious, who's currently teaching Blender to young students aged 10 to 16? Nobody, okay, 16 to 20? Pre-university? I usually use two. Okay, cool. Well, we're going to talk today about how to teach Blender to school age kids, because the three of us have been doing that for a while. Who are we? I'll start with me, myself. I'm Monique. I am half of Edmite. So I'm partially also developing on the Blender Composter. And since this year also set up a platform for teaching Blender to young students, which is called B3D101. And here we have Tom. I'm tired of running out of pants. So, okay, so I'm from 3D Ami as is Pete. And we gave a talk about this last year. We run a summer school. We're getting kids for seven days. And we make a complete film beginning to end. And the kids are 14 to 18 year old. And I'm also a UCL researcher in graphics and stuff. Yeah, whatever. Okay, I'm obviously Peter. You can see how close these photos actually look like to us. It's very interesting. So I've been teaching Blender to school age kids since 2007, with the old interface, which was really, really nasty. And you're going to see some of our work, the work that we've been doing in the last couple of years, coming up very shortly. So I'll pass back to the next slide is Tom. Oh, that's me. I have a button. I just know you should give me the button. So 3D Ami, I mentioned it just now. And it's sort of the big thing which we do as students. And so it's a very large, complex event. It takes a lot of resources to run. We get in 14 to 18 year olds, teams of nine to 10, and they make films. And it is complete script writing, storyboarding. They make everything. Characters, sets, the works. But what are the numbers? Our budget was last year quite big. This year was a bit smaller, but we still did three teams. This being our fifth year. And what I would say is I did give a talk last year. It's on YouTube if you're at the Blender Conference. It's on YouTube if you want to see it. So we're not really going to talk up 3D Ami any further. This is just saying this is where we come from. We're now going to focus on younger students. Yes. Well, for two years, I've been supporting quite some events in the Netherlands. And everybody was... A lot of people and a lot of kids were screaming, I want to learn Blender. I want to learn 3D. So I started this year just with a website providing some free tutorials for kids to learn. And I've been supporting quite some events. Together with Tom, we did the Leeds event. And this year the Dutch Codoclast kicked off, which is a school that's going to teach Blender for six years. So there's looking for a multi-level program. And these are things that I've been doing apart from the Blender work and my own work. So having a site online with free tutorials, multi-lingual and supporting events and school projects. So, yeah. On Facebook you can see some more what kids have been making with creating with Blender. So this... Oh, sorry, that was there. This actually leads to why on earth are we trying to teach 3D animation to school students? And many of you might have been learning this when you were in school. And many of you would have only found any sort of formal education by the time you got to university. So the main driving force is behind why we're doing this, why we're teaching school-aged kids are listed here. I'm going to start from the bottom. So I started teaching this in 2007 because kids wanted to make the films that they were watching. And there's a huge social mobility issue here as well. In Britain you pay a lot of money to go to university. So I was teaching in a sitcom college. And letting children of, say, 14, 15, 16, 17 experience what it's like to create 3D animations. Allowed them to better choose the university course that they were going to go and study. So many students, you ask them, do you want to go and make games? Or do you want to make 3D movies? They say, yes, of course they do. Because that's really exciting. It sounds really exciting. But when you actually give them the experience of doing that, many of them go, actually, this isn't for me. So you save them 9,000 pounds, about 9,000 euros a year by giving them this experience really, really early on. And what else... So we've got films, games, motivating students. But we've also got some other stuff from there too. So we've got the idea that we want kids to be able to express themselves. And lots of children are doing 2D animation. Lots of children are using Flash. And lots of even do stickman animations. All that stop motion, all that sort of stuff is happening. So 3D seemed like a very natural progression from that. And this is allowing kids to be creative in a format that they're very used to. They are consuming this all the time. But very rarely do we actually let them make it. And the other factor, which I found so exciting, so my main job is I train computer science teachers. And you've got this idea of computational thinking. So how do you make computers do things for you? And 3D animation is all about making computers bring your ideas to life. And very rarely in the world of computer science, now, if you're teaching it in schools, do you get to, I say, humble the computer. The computer just does what you want to. So if you want to go and search through a million records, it doesn't take very long, maybe a second, two seconds. If you want to make an animation, all of a sudden your computer becomes something which is humbled by the task you're giving it. It takes a long time to do what you're trying to do with it. And you've got to think very computationally. You've got to think about ways of making the computer do things in clever ways, clever ways of solving problems. It's not just about, here's a computer, here's a task done. They've got to start thinking computationally, breaking down tasks, abstracting tasks, little algorithms to go and solve things to actually create the thing that they want to create. And that, for me, as a computer science educator, is very exciting. So, hopefully, I've just made the case for why we're teaching 3D animation. And then naturally, we've said, why are we teaching Blender? Now, I'm preaching to the choir, we would say, because you guys are all, well, probably all of you Blender users, or most of you Blender users. You Blender for whatever reason you want to use it. But there really is an important aspect to picking, sorry, aspect of picking Blender above the other programs. And if I look at these things here, so here are some of your main programs that you could use to teach 3D animation in schools. And actually, the companies making these programs are very keen for them to be used in schools. And they provide student licenses. And now that's really good. So, the fact that Blender's free, that's not such a big deal for schools, okay? And it's not such a big deal for us teaching Blender. But there are other factors which make Blender so important in terms of teaching 3D animation. And you look at multi-platform, well, the other products, they work multi-platform as well. So that's not such a big deal either. But the fact is you can run Blender from a USB stick. And we have run Blender from a USB stick across dozens of computers before. If you're a kid who at home doesn't have much access to a computer, it's not installed at school. You can get Blender on USB, you can go down your library or run your grant, and you can run it there. So there's a huge social mobility issue here about how accessible Blender is. Look at the install sizes. I mean, you're probably aware of that as well. So you don't need to have even a modern computer to do this. I've been running it on some of the, you know, really terrible, badly installed computers in schools. If you do any work with schools, you might find that the networks are really hard to install things on. You can run it from a shared drive. You can run it from a USB stick. So we have a huge social mobility issue here as well. Now, you might find the commercial projects thing a bit weird. So why would a child at the age of 15 be making commercial projects? Well, it happens. And we've had students making thousands of dollars through selling stuff online. They were using the other products. Well, the licenses, they're free for kids to use, but they can play around with them. They can't sell things. So we are enabling students who are very young to actually use a commercial tool to make money out of it. So they are starting to fund themselves. And we've got the full pipeline. So you're going to see in a second when we talk about the interface and how we teach the use of the interface. By swapping from one program to another program to another program, you're going to find quickly that kids get very confused. Having one interface, the entire pipeline in one program is really, really powerful if you want children to be developing films. If you want them to be modeling something, okay, just use the tool for modeling. That could be Blender. It could be something else. If you want them to make a film, every part of a film, you need to be talking about Blender because the other products do not do this for you. You have to learn different things. The final one, which is students prefer it. You will have so many arguments about this. Oh, kids hate Blender. The interface is too complicated. We have the same conversation with kids using Maya, using Fuseo Max, using Modo. It doesn't matter. It really, for us, it seems to be what they start with. So kids prefer one thing over another. You know, it really is, you're going to see in a second, how you teach it rather than something being more suited for children than something else. Okay. Exactly. It's blended too difficult. I know there has been lots of remarks about this. Blender is way too difficult to learn. My experience? Well, no, it's not. Kids are able, our young students can handle complex software. They're able to manage the user interface as long as you tell them where to click and just focus on certain parts of the user interface. And it really depends on how you teach them. Don't do a 20-minute video or 10 actions in one minute because they go bizarre. They lose you after 10 seconds. And so, it really depends on the way you teach Blender to children. And we've done several events. The list is even longer and getting longer and longer. And the nice thing is about the coda class. This year, the first Dutch school started teaching Blender to kids as part of a six-year program. So, they started with 12-year-olds and I received the question, oh, does Blender has a six-year ability level program from 12 to 18? I was like, no, I don't know. So, we managed together with Peter and Tom to set up a program for the first year. They're going to start in December. But you see schools and children moving on. They want to learn. And they've been creating amazing things. Really. So, if we want to teach students to do this stuff, there's a question of what do we need to create? What do we need to be out there in the real world so they can get and do all of this? Now, obviously, they're the online tutorials. I'm going to point out some flaws of many of the online tutorials as they currently exist in a second. But we need the online tutorials so they can learn from themselves. But we need to get them started. And so, we need starter sessions. And these are really important if you want students using Blender because if they just go over there, they don't know Blender exists. If they go to the website and download it, they're probably going to get stuck. And you need that thing to get them to start so that's really important. And once you've got the starter sessions going, you need to give them something bigger, something to really push them, to really get the ball rolling. And that's all the events. That's where 3D Ami kind of stuff comes in. And you can also do art school clubs and the odd-ever blending day, which is when you have like a one-day event where students come along and they learn some of the Blender and they move on again. So, next slide. I have no idea why I'm doing this slide. It's enormous and really quite painful. So, this is sort of an attempt and it's as much for reference after this talk as it is for during the talk to go through and talk about essentially what's important if you're making a tutorial, an online video for the younger students. Most of the tutorials out there, they're fine if you're at university, but for... you give them into a 10-year-old not a chance, giving them even to a 16-year-old not a chance. So, the first two points aren't really that interesting. This is just common if you're making a good polish tutorial and polish matters a lot more when you're dealing with younger students because they don't have quite as much motivation. They're much more likely to quit and move on to another video. So, you do need to just polish. And yeah, edit, multiple takes, use a good mic, polish and have a plan. There's nothing more irritating for a 10-year-old and the tutorial just goes off and mumbles about some unrelated concept for a while. But probably the most important point when it comes to beginners, and I say this point knowing full well that almost every beginner's video tutorial series makes this mistake, don't structure it like a reference book. A reference book is structured one chapter on the user interface, one chapter on 3D modelling, it's this very rigid structure. Structure around projects. Students want to be doing something. They want to go in and learn just enough about the interface to use it. They want to learn just enough about modelling to use it. They want to learn just enough about lighting and they do that project. And then you spiral around again and then you teach them a little more of a second project and so on and so forth. If you try and spend, and the example given there because there's about five of these on the internet, a 20-minute intro to the interface they don't watch it, they give up and they walk away before they even get to doing anything. It doesn't achieve the goal you're after. Short, attention span of students is not great, but more so than that you want to show them something and then have them do it immediately. If you show them lots of things then remember the last thing if they do it immediately afterwards, but they forget the rest. You need to give them time to reinforce it. So five-minute video, they do something. You'll see the structure in a second. There's a need for in schools subtitles. Headphones can be problematic in a school, particularly you can't have in-ear headphones in a school. It's just not allowed because of hygiene. Students often have the phone, but not always. So you do need to have subtitles. It's a silly little thing, but it actually matters and it's also good for disability. Teachers can't ignore it. Many, many students are making their teaching plan for all of their students if they've got one disabled student in there, not an option. And it also just comes down to when you're dealing with younger students, as you reach university age you can sort of do English and everybody knows it well enough to go along. But for younger students they need to be in their own language. So if you're just doing English in the UK, America, Australia but everywhere else can't use your tutorials. And then we can get on to even younger students. If you're talking about really young ones 10, 12, and I think the youngest I've ever dealt with is 6 which admittedly didn't work very well, but it's all the work. You need to make them shorter. You need to have a written version because they may not want to watch a video and really slow it down. It means you just can't fit in 10 concepts into a single video. It needs to be like one concept for the video. They practice it in the next video one concept to move on. So, and yeah repetition is on both lists. University student is self-motivated. You can say it once and if they get stuck then rewind the video and do it again. Many younger people don't think to do that. They get stuck and they try and keep going without it or they just give up completely. So yeah, next slide I believe. So here's it's not very pretty, I'm afraid, but here's an example from what we've been working on. Now, this is what it's now becoming the famous party monkey. You're dressing a monkey to go to a party. You can probably tell there's Suzanne, there's the cone on top of Suzanne's head and we've got the skills that they're going to cover. So it's a five minute video about five minutes and all they're learning is how to add, delete and move items. That's it. If you watch some of the intro videos as Tom was saying there might be 20 minutes telling you all these different concepts. This is a five minute video on how to add, delete and move items and at the end of that the students can go on and do pretty much they can play around with adding, moving and deleting objects but they can make some pretty fancy stuff there and I think if you wind back you'll see a couple of them in some of Minik's slides. So going back to the interface now this is a big deal it's been a big deal at these conferences for a couple of years now everyone says the blender interface is pretty terrible that you can't possibly learn how to use this. What we have done with these tutorials is we've really focused on a couple of the very basic tools that they need to get started and I've made over here, I've just blown that up we've got the move, the rotate and the resize and move, rotate, resize allows a student to create all sorts of things in blender without learning and actually without using any keyboard shortcuts as well so we start off without keyboard shortcuts and slowly they appear slowly they move in because getting a student using a mouse and the keyboard and the heads and looking at a tutorial there's a lot going on there so we stick with the mouse as an interface and we work our way up from that point so what have I done well this is the curriculum that I put together about two years ago we've got some funding from the Google computer science for high schools to teach computational thinking through 3D animation and this is freely available if you want to go and take it, translate it we're going to talk about that a little bit later and you can see some concepts there I put them in red to make them quite obvious but what we've done each one of those bullet points is a video it's a three, four, five minute video so the student will learn about moving and adding objects to take a monkey to a party that's the first video, they've got a task there they can go and do that and then they can see how they get on then we learn about resizing objects to make trees that's my very poor attempt at making a cube tree then we've got about rotating objects so you make a snowman, well if I want to get the nose on a snowman, I need to go and rotate something and then we're going to color in our snowman so we're not using texturing material language just yet we're talking about coloring in and in the video they can start to learn what those words mean we're not going to scare them off and modeling so they can make a house we're going to see an example in a second of a rocket which gets turned into a tent and then we go and animate our winter scene and then we go render it out so we've got well it's actually eight videos there but there's eight videos to step the students through the process of learning the very basics of blender and that's 40 minutes of film and we normally cover that in about two to three hours and at the end of it, I'm going to show you right now, this is the sort of stuff they're producing so this is where it all goes a bit wrong I'm going to have to go over here and hit the space bar hopefully oh no that's not what I wanted can you there we go so two to three hours learning the basics or not working at all oh no okay that's fine what can we do so I'm not a Mac person either can you help me out apologies let's I'll try one more time so you can see you've got snowman in there you've got the trees but they're different trees they're not the trees that I taught them how to make they're trees that they've gone on to go and experiment with themselves they've made a road we didn't teach that but they've by learning to move color things in to delete to add they've got that working so let's try one more time it's very short videos here we go reversing ooh okay so two to three hours work but they've got the basics there they're starting to create the creative stuff that they want to see working let's try the next one oops it's going to work maybe not okay here we go this is a bit more complicated ah it's not what I wanted there we go so we've got some double surfaces there a bit glitchy and there's your rockets turned into a tent same well this idea is to bring it together putting it into something that they want to make so let's bring this to a close um we have some resources already and the resources are being used by hundreds we might be over a thousand now but hundreds of children around Europe and beyond we know that they work because we've used them and they work when we use them but we do need them translating into some other languages and as Manik said earlier we have Dutch, we have English we have German and no French people in here? there's a volunteer okay so what we have here is we have we have resources a lot of it's in text so you can just do a straight text translation we've got the videos they just need another kind of language track putting on them and that will help us out so um we want more videos creating we've got a little set of advice there which Tom took you through if you follow that you can start adding to this big collection of videos for very young children um and we would love to see more events running depending on your country you might have different things um happening a bit like Manik mentioned earlier so if you're interested in this and you think you can run an event um getting contact and we can give you the resources we can talk you through how it runs and you can see some amazing things happening with children in your area um personally some of myself would love to see 3D Ami growing so if you um want to lose eight days of your summer holiday um we can teach you how to do that um and we've also obviously got this blender 101 user interface project which is um starting up which Tom mentioned earlier so there's there's lots of stuff you could get involved with and what we're going to do is we're going to have a meeting upstairs today at 3.30 for anybody who's interested or who just wants to find out a bit more and maybe even volunteer some time and we've got three minutes left okay all right well thank you very much and we'll be around for questions at 3.30