Subject:
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Re: Part Authoring with MLCAD
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.cad.mlcad
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Date:
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Thu, 26 Aug 2004 19:50:45 GMT
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Viewed:
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7561 times
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> In lugnet.cad.mlcad, Darrell Urbien wrote:
> I'll echo Orion's question: where do you teach? What level/subject(s) do you
> teach? I'm interested how and why you've chosen to insert LDraw parts authoring
> into your curriculum.. Was it difficult to convince your superiors?
I am an adjunct instructor for Portland State University. I contract with a
pre-college PSU affiliate called Saturday Academy www.saturdayacademy.pdx.edu>
I teach programming and robotics courses to kids from 4th to 12th grade (that's
10 - 18 year olds, for those of you not familiar with U.S. Ed Sys)
I have almost absolute free rein in the planning and delivery of class material.
The limiting factor is usually the Sys Admin at the particular location For
example, at the universities, it takes a month prior to the start of the term to
request software installation. Therefore, if the kids show particular interest
in parts authoring, but I had not requested LDAO, then we simply can't go there.
I taught my first Lego CAD class this summer to 10 kids ages 10 - 14. The
advertized objective was to create building instructions in support of First
Lego League.
The first 5 hours of class acquainted the kids to the parts library,
orthographic view and placement/rotation in MLCAD. On day 3, I took one of the
kid's models to show how to check for mis-alignments. Then, to emphasis the
need for Steps, I rendered the model as is with no steps.
After seeing the model in glorious color, they all took off towards making
scenes and rendering them. Then the curse of the missing part reared it's ugly
head. The kids were undaunted. They wanted to learn how to author parts.
However. after presenting them with Orion's Powerpoint presentation on Part
Authoring, they decided to put it off for later.
Based on that experience, I believe that young kids could easily learn how to
create and render models. The really determined ones, those missing some parts,
would probably be eager to author them as well (given that the tools were more
kid friendly). For now, I'm not even going to mention how to get their parts
through the voting and certification process. For one, I don't exactly know
what the process is! But I am about to find out by trial by fire!
Another area that seems to be well-aligned with Virtual Lego is Game Making. I
have 4x more kids taking Game Maker classes than Lego Robotics. To them, the
prospect of creating fully actionable 3D objects is very enticing. They'll be
more than willing to learn how to create models and parts because they WANT TO.
At the moment, that's where I think the market will take me. As such, I'll be
offering new Lego CAD classes in the Winter after I complete prepping for them
this term.
Forward and onward!
Edwin
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Message is in Reply To:
 | | Re: Part Authoring with MLCAD
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| (...) Hi, I'll echo Orion's question: where do you teach? What level/subject(s) do you teach? I'm interested how and why you've chosen to insert LDraw parts authoring into your curriculum.. Was it difficult to convince your superiors? I teach CAD at (...) (20 years ago, 25-Aug-04, to lugnet.cad.mlcad)
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