Continuing the Open Source software theme.  I have been attending a course on 3D animation for the last 10 weeks, it came to an end this week.  I attended primarily to bring my Blender skills up a notch or two.  I am self taught and am well aware that while this method can work well it is also a recipie for engendering bad habits!

The course was at the Freelance Animation School here in Auckland and their program of choice is Max 3DS.  As is usual at the end of these things we had to complete an evaluation.  I thanked Mark our tutor for teaching me more about Blender in the previous weeks that I had learnt in a long time.  He was confused as we had not even looked at Blender!  It got me thinking and we discussed how using Open Source 3D animation would be a good choice for adult evening classes.  At this point his boss walked in and we had a discussion about why Open Source software should be offered as a short course option.  I believe that offering short courses in Inkscape and Blender for example to secondary school teachers would be able to provide foundation courses in these programmes in school which would teach the pupils the basic principles of the programmes that in courses such as the ones offered at Freelance, students would arrive with a better grounding and with a skill set that could be easily transferred to the commercial variants that the work with at Freelance.

Mark’s boss seemed very impressed by this notion.  We are currently investigating how I could put together a programme of lessons for their tutors, alumni and existing students in such open source programmes as Blender, Inkscape, The Gimp etc and have me deliver them.  I have already drafted out a series of lessons and skills, I will be meeting the school again in a week or so to continue the planning.