Autodesk the Savior of American Education?

You've no doubt noticed an uptick in the quality of entertainment delivery systems of late. We have high definition (HD) television, 3D movies and TV, tremendously realistic games and high-resolution graphics in our print and online media.

My wife and I bought a Samsung internet-ready TV a few months ago. We were shocked by the quality of the shows we were watching, especially HD TV shows. We have had HD for years now, but it took this TV to illustrate how amazingly clear and precise the technology is. In fact, we were kind of disappointed when watching some shows because they looked just like the soap operas: you could clearly tell the actors were on a set, which served to downplay the realness of the show. We've since gotten used to the TV, but those first few days with it were a startling revelation. We just couldn't get over how realistic everything looked.

One of the major software companies in the entertainment creation space is called Autodesk. This company manufactures software that is used in architectural, manufacturing, and creative arts industries. You may have heard the word "CAD" before. The acronym stands for Computer Aided Drafting, and AutoCAD--Autodesk's CAD software program--is the industry leader. Their relatively new architecture software--Revit--is quickly becoming the de facto standard for architects as well.

But you may not have heard of some other Autodesk software that is probably every bit as industry-utilized as AutoCAD. The product? Maya. The uses? Well, nearly all movies, games, TV shows and commercials that use photo-realistically-created models and animations were most likely made using Maya.

There are other 3D modeling software packages that are popular as well: 3DS Max, Mudbox, and Softimage come to mind. These are also owned by Autodesk, as is a rigging package called MotionBuilder. Some niche players that are not owned by Autodesk are Blender (an open source package), ZBrush, and Cinema 4D, to name a few. However, taken together, all of these non-Autodesk products and their cousins represent no more than a fraction of the industry: such is Autodesk's grasp.

What is rigging, you ask? Rigging is the process of giving a 3D character its "bones" and applying a technique called inverse kinematics (IK) to make the character assume poses and engage in various motions such as running or walking.

Autodesk entertainment creation software is incredibly sophisticated, with bundled in physics, animation,   IK, particle system, and lighting software. Some programs even include their own programming language so that the animation events can be scripted.

Now here's what's really cool: Autodesk is very committed to education. As such, the company has offered nearly all of its software for free with a three-year license, to educators and students. The software packages offered include the majority of industries Autodesk targets. This free software is the full version, but Autodesk warns that the software is for educational purposes only. Additionally, Autodesk provides streaming video tutorials, and a variety of other training assists to help people come up to speed on the software. You can visit this site to find out more about the program.

I have taught 3DS Max and Maya for the last couple of years now, and if your students are like mine, I think you'll find they are crazy for this software. They want to learn it, which drives them to seek out tutorials on it to refine their knowledge. Additionally, the software easily navigates students toward the underlying academics required to accommodate the full breadth and depth of its capabilities: mathematics and technological reading, to name two.

There is one problem: You cannot install this free software on classroom computers: you must buy a license for each computer that will run the programs. Even here Autodesk has made some inroads, in terms of academic licensing. This class of software is very expensive: on the order of thousands of dollars. But Autodesk has (graciously, I think) bundled their software into two basic groups: CAD/Architecture and Entertainment Creation, and offered them as relatively inexpensive bundled applications for use by schools.

This upcoming school year I plan on using Maya, MotionBuilder, Mudbox and Softimage in my classes to augment my game programming sections.

Here's why: Lots of students think they want to be a game programmer. Why? Because they play the games a lot, think they're fun, and can't imagine how much more fun it would be to program them.

However, once a kid learns what the C++ language is like--or, to be less language-specific: programming in general--many of them become turned off to the software engineering aspect of the industry. But they fall in love with with another equally as important aspect: 3D modeling and animation: which is where the Autodesk products come into play (no pun intended).

Now here's the thing: This software is no walk in the park to learn. Take a look at the Maya and Mudbox interfaces below and you'll quickly see this software doesn't look anything like Microsoft Word or Excel, or Facebook or Gmail. Pretty sophisticated stuff.

Autodesk Maya 2012 User Interface (UI)

 Autodesk Mudbox 2012 UI

I am not a subject matter expert (SME) in these technologies. Unless you work with the products every day, I'm not sure you could be a SME--given their sophistication. But that does not deter me from offering it to kids and helping them understand not only how to use the software, but why it's important to the industry. I think that industry tie-in is essential: it gives kids ownership: it is the value proposition they're looking for. It's not just math for math's sake: it uses geometric math to create cool animations. It has practical significance in the after high school world: you can get a job doing this stuff.

This industry tie-in brings home the relevance you're trying to get across: "Look, we want you to go to college, get a degree, and then find a job in which you're using what you were taught. We don't want you living in your mom's basement, we want you to be a productive tax-paying member of our society."

I use a lot of streaming, distance learning to augment my classes. One of the bigger players is called Digital Tutors (DT - see screen shot of opening website page below). 

Digital Tutors opening website page

I have found DT's content to be superior in quality. The people who craft the lessons are certified by Autodesk, and they are all very, very good teachers. I spend my summers getting acquainted with the software, and becoming familiar with the new upgrades. I use DT heavily in this work.

Another site I like a lot is called 3D Buzz. Jason "Buzz" Busby and Zak Parrish--the two primary educators--offer quite a bit of free content on this site, material you can use in the classroom to help students understand how the software works. One of the practical elements of the 3D Buzz site is that Buzz and Zak tell you how things work in the industry: what to expect. Here's a screen shot of the 3D Buzz website:

3D Buzz Website

I have found that about 50% of my students become turned off with writing code--which is fine, better in class than in a job--and turn to the 3D modeling and animation programs. Many of my students go on to college, declaring a major in the subject.

Here's the point: Autodesk has met you half-way. They have put tons and tons of great free software at your fingertips. They have provided tutorials, examples and a variety of other curriculum and teaching methodologies. But at the end of it, it's up to you to make the decision to go forward and teach it.

This is where I've run into every kind of excuse there is: "I'm just not technical like you," is the predominant one.

But I wasn't technical when I first started learning Maya. I didn't know a UV from a CV (both 3D modeling and animation terms). I had to learn it the same way you learned it: from the ground up. And I learned everything I know today (which isn't anywhere close to being complete) from DT and 3D Buzz.

Let me finish this blog with an anecdotal story. A young woman came into my game programming class last year, not knowing what game programming was, but with an expectant air to find out something about it.

She didn't like writing code, but she soon discovered Autodesk Maya. I tasked her with modeling one of our culinary arts teachers, a great guy from Germany (hello Chef Schaaf). In the ensuing months she took head-on and side-on photographs of Chef Schaaf and, using them as reference images, began creating him in the 3D world. In doing so, she filled in missing blanks in her Maya education with online tutorials and YouTube videos (even Autodesk uses YouTube for its instructional video delivery mechanism). She'd spend all class time sitting at the computer, deeply engrossed in her modeling efforts.

When it came to putting hair on Chef Schaaf and creating realistic eyes, she got pretty firmly stuck for a several week-long period. Remember that I was not anywhere close to being able to provide her the kind of in-depth instruction she needed. She went through a significant web hunt, looking for SMEs who had been there, done that, with respect to generating Maya hair and eyes. She found them. In fact, she often found conflicting information and had to go through the process of differentiating truth from error.

Nearly three months into the spring semester, she finally cracked the eye modeling difficulty, successfully creating photorealistic eyes.

She graduated high school last year with the intent of going to college to study 3D modeling and animation. She's incredibly smart, quite gifted and will make a wonderful teammate on any team anywhere. I'm quite confident she'll ultimately wind up managing a team of professionals.

This is just one success story Autodesk has been responsible (at least in part) for creating. Had the software not been available to her, she would doubtless have gone down another path.

If you're looking for a way to bring modern, high-tech, incredibly cool software into your classroom, I think you could do no better than turning to Autodesk for assistance.

You, Kids and Sugar

I love the Dr. Oz show on TV. The web site isn't that great--way too much information and tough to surf, in my opinion--but you can catch snippets of previous episodes and get lots of tips and tricks.

My wife and I DVR all of the TV episodes and watch them as often as possible.

I like Dr. Oz because he helps me stay on course with my diet (OK, I drop the ball periodically), and reminds me exactly why I'm interested in good diet in the first place. At 56 years old, I want to not just live longer, I want to make sure I live a good, healthy life, without sickness and disease. What's the good in living to be 100 if you contract cancer and Alzheimer's disease and other diseases?

Recently Dr. Oz aired an episode about pancreatic cancer. This disease is practically a guaranteed death sentence, partly because it's quite difficult to get to surgically, also because it's not a painful cancer until later on: one doesn't know they have it until they're dying from it. Dr. Oz said pancreatic cancer takes 20 years to come to fruition in the body and once you know you have it, it's usually too late: only about 15% of those diagnosed with it live much longer than a few months after the diagnosis.

What are the symptoms of pancreatic cancer? Oz said there were four: (1) Pain in the abdominal area, especially with waves into the area of the back; (2) Jaundice; (3) White (no color) poop; (4) Dark tea-colored urine.

Who is typically more prone to coming down with this disease? Well there are five categories of people who tend toward it more than others: (1) African-Americans; (2) People with diabetes; (3); People with a family history of pancreatic cancer; (4) Smokers, and surprisingly; (5) Soda drinkers.

People who are over 50 and who have a recent diagnosis of Type II diabetes should immediately get screened for pancreatic cancer.

The researchers on the Oz show were quite specific to mention soda as a key pancreatic cancer contributor. In fact, they said that no more than two cans a week could be dangerous.

Two cans? Some of these kids guzzle it two liters at a time; and many, many parents think nothing of letting their kids have a can or two at lunch and again at dinner. Some even let the kids drink it for breakfast! Sadly, I think some parents aren't aware how much soda their kids are imbibing. Even more sadly, school districts have agreements with Pepsi and Coca Cola and the machines are stocked full of the stuff. The kids haul around gigantic tankards of the stuff.

The researchers said part of the danger in soda is the insidious "sugar" that is put in it: high fructose corn syrup (HFCS). This isn't actually sugar as we knew it when we were growing up; it's sugar that has been chemically engineered from corn. Many naturopathic practitioners insist your body doesn't have any way of recognizing this artificial sugar: it's a complete foreigner to the body and thus may be even more dangerous than the old cane- or beet-derived sugar. My personal opinion: Aspertame is even more dangerous, and yet many of us convince ourselves we're somehow "dieting" when we drink diet soda that uses Aspertame as its sweetener, even though we may be doing exactly the opposite.

But in addition to the personal health risks, here's the message for educators: Kids are taking in far more sugar than they need. I don't think it's a stretch to say most kids are absolutely addicted to sugar: especially soda pop.

The American Heart Association has recently come out with sugar intake guidelines that most adults will find startling. Current US consumer sugar intake is 22 teaspoons per day: about 7 1/2 pounds of the stuff a month.  The American Heart Association recommends no more than 5 teaspoons (20 grams) per day. Tell you what: give it a try. See if you can stay under 20 grams a day eating conventional American foods you buy over the counter. Just read any bag, bottle or other container to see how many sugars are in a food item per serving. You won't have any room for cookies, brownies, soda, candy or other goodies: you'll get all the sugar you need just from ordinary foods. In fact, you'll have to struggle to stay under the 20 grams.

Now think about those kids who, you and I both know, often take in far more sugar than their adult counterparts. Why? Well, because we (parents and educators) want to give kids good things, and one of the really warm, comfortable, good things we grew up with is sugar. "Sugar and spice, and everything nice," remember?

But what we may really be doing (God forbid) is starting the development of cancers (including pancreatic) and diabetes in many of these little ones. They'll get along just fine eating the cakes, pies, ice cream, candy and other sugar-laden snacks and drinking copious amounts of soda until one day the silent pancreatic cancer killer has finally built its fortress and chokes off the pancreas. And then, what happens? Surgery? Chemotherapy? Radiation therapy?

If you watch the episodes in the Dr. Oz website link above, you'll catch the part about a researcher who has come up with a vaccine that could potentially stop the cancer in its tracks. The vaccine is in its infancy right now: trial stages in various parts of the country. But it has promise. So, if there's a vaccine in the making, does that make it OK for us to continue taking in all of the sugar? Hmmm.

Here's what I often wonder about: Back in the day when the Ma and Pa American Farmer brought in the goods, we had real milk, real sugar, eggs and butter. We ate lots of whole foods, lots less manufactured foods. Soda crackers were about as manufactured as we got back then, and maybe canned soup. Even "TV dinners" were a fad 25 years ago.

But food science has brought us so far and today there are few foods that actually hearken back to their native cousins without some sort of trifling. Moreover, sugar intake has exponentially increased compared to the good old days when a piece of candy was a weekend treat, and HFCS has replaced much of the actual white stuff.

I just wonder if one of the best things we can do for our students is help them think more carefully about food choices, and maybe get away from so much manufactured and sugar-laden foods, and back toward a more natural plate: half-vegetables, lean non-processed meats, real fruits: things like that.

If we work so hard educating these youngsters, knowing we've taught them great things, and then we watch them walk out into a world where in just 20 short years many of them will contract diabetes, and even worse, cancers: what good have we done?

Seems to me like schools are where good food education should start, not where kids can get away with eating anything they desire.

First-hand View of Educational Research

I had quite an opportunity this summer. The National Assessment Governing Board (NAGB), caretakers of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), also known as the Nation's Report Card, were looking for people who teach Computer Support Technician (CST) programs at their schools (secondary or post-secondary) who would like to come to St. Louis, Missouri for a week to participate in a study that determines the minimal level of mathematics education a student would require to enter such a program.

NAGB is a Congressionally appointed board consisting of various legislative and educational experts who convene to determine how well the US is doing in terms of academics such as math and reading (other topics are assessed as well). There's a company called WestEd that contracts a lot of the work the NAGB requires.

I had no idea what to expect. Though I've had a lot of post-secondary math training (Calc I, II, and III and some differential equations), I know I don't have much of an aptitude for math. I'm not a good math test-taker: even though I can ultimately reason my way to the right answer 75% of the time, I can't do it in the time limitations of most tests. I seldom get math questions right, and I cannot for the life of me formulate an algebraic expression for a given situation.

Further, to be really honest, math bores me to tears. I don't like reading equations or talking about math. It's just not an interesting subject to me.

But that doesn't mean I don't recognize its importance in the classroom, especially with computer science topics.

As a sidebar here: we need to differentiate between a Computer Support Technician--think "Geek Squad" and you have the right idea: people who repair computers and provide customer support for computer users--and a Computer Science major who will wind up writing code or working as a hardware engineer someplace like Texas Instruments or Intel. These are two different people. The former doesn't require a lot of math, the latter needs tremendous math education. (The reason why the latter needs so much might be good fodder for another blog post at another time.)

In St. Louis the first thing we were presented with were the stakeholders who were actually going to do the hard-core statistical analysis and research work required for the week. They billed themselves as "psychometricians" a term I'd not heard before, or if I had, it was only vaguely stored somewhere in my memory.

There weren't just CST teachers at the event, there were also math, reading and, surprisingly, Heating, Ventilation, and Air-conditioning (HVAC) teachers there as well. The week would be spent with some groups assessing minimal reading requirements for entering a CST or HVAC programs and some who would be involved with minimal math requirements. For each group--reading and math--there were two panels: Panel A and Panel B.

The three ladies heading up the effort--all Ph.D.s--were surprisingly organized and extremely clear in their instructions for us. Two of the women, Jannae and Susan, gave small presentations welcoming us to the week, but the primary heavy-lifting, in terms of speaking to us about requirements for the week, would come from a psychometrician named Luz. She was quite clear in laying out the weeks' work for us, and in showing us the path we would follow as the days elapsed. I was amazed with the organization these ladies displayed. Instructions and expectations were clear and they took lots of extra time to make sure everyone understood the basic concepts they were talking about, the outcomes they were after.

We were introduced to the 2009 NAEP mathematics exam. In fact, we had to take it, just like the seniors in various high schools took it. (NAEP is not required, and is administered by participating schools.) We saw exactly what the kids see.

Next we were introduced to about half of the test items (our counterpart--Panel A: we were Panel B--had the other half) and went over them in fine-tooth detail. There were math teachers, CST teachers and a facilitator in the room. Our goal was to understand the types of questions (multiple choice and constructive-response across algebra, geometry and trigonometry) and determine which questions fit into the minimal requirements for those entering CST programs--whether at the secondary or post-secondary level.

We spent a good deal of our time also writing what was called the Borderline Performance Description (BPD): a document that exactly stated the Knowledge, Skills and Abilities (KSAs) a student entering a CST program would need to know. A doctorate of mathematics in Georgia whose professor of mathematics job is to teach middle- and high-school teachers how to teach math walked us through the shaping of the BPD. We went through three different drafts of the document finalizing it toward the end of the week.

We frequently gathered together in a common place where Luz taught some very basic psychometric concepts. I was quite interested when we were in this setting, as we were shown the behind the scenes thinking statistical people are involved with when shaping assessment items and determining statistical correlation. She drew S-curves and talked about their statistical importance, talked about the varying degrees of difficulty of the NAEP math assessment items, spent some time going through exactly why we were going to take several passes through the data, and eventually set what was called a bookmark when we were confident of the minimal cutoff score needed on the NAEP assessment to enter a CST program.

In fact, we would set three bookmarks at various times during the week, based upon new information, and going back through the test items, discussing the relative importance of each to our programs. We spend a lot of time looking at the test items, ultimately obtaining a fairly intimate familiarity with them.

The biggest revelation I came away with was the seriousness and dedication of these researchers. This coming from a guy who thought the joke "Sixty-seven percent of statistics are simply made up on the fly" was funny. Not only did they have intimate knowledge of the test items, the reasons they were developed the way they were, and the rubrics by which they were scored, they also had a passion for determining as closely as possible the singular nut of truth denoting the cutoff score.

They looked at the data "fifteen ways from Sunday." We heard all kinds of different ways in which the data could be compared and intellectualized. I learned a great deal about the way in which psychometricians think.

There was a Thursday revelation in which we were shown where actual 2009 NAEP test-takers stood with regard to our minimal CST requirements. We were shocked! Only about 18% of NAEP test-takers would be able to enter our programs, given the cutoff we'd currently established: bookmarking the place where we felt the test items  were no longer relevant for students in our program. I should note that the folks from NAEP made it very clear they were never going to publish these minimal requirements as an insistent baseline for students entering CST programs.  These were merely recommended math levels we had established. None of this work was even guaranteed to find its way into being published, let alone recommended.

So we reassessed again, and made our final decisions, setting our final bookmark, establishing our final cutoff scores.

But we weren''t done. Next the psychometricians compared Panel A with Panel B scores. It was surprising how differently we'd assessed things. My group was a little lower, the other group a little higher. And of course, the psychometricians would take this data and correlate it so that a definitive cutoff could be determined. In other words, our cutoff score would not necessarily be the ultimate cutoff score.

I left with the impression that people who develop assessments and, more importantly, those who analyze and correlate that data, are really serious individuals who have a commitment to the truth the results dictate.

My only issue is a nagging sense that this data isn't important to anyone. Why? Well, first of all, because the NAEP isn't required, and it's taken by 12th graders who really don't need to take it, nor are the majority of them  at all interested in it. Moreover, there was no guarantee our results would ever be known, and it was made loudly clear that there would never be a recommendation by the NAGB that kids wanting to go into a CST program be required to have this set of minimal math knowledge. Finally, and I think this is very important, none of the NAEP stakeholders had ever heard of CompTIA, the de-facto standard in certification testing in the computer industry. Lots of who teach CST programs lobbied hard for NAGB to develop a relationship with CompTIA, as this would be a harmonious relationship. But I was saddened when I heard the math professor say "We'll never talk to CompTIA. They can come to us, but we won't go to them."

To sum up: I'm very glad Federal education stakeholders are starting to think about careers and back away a little bit from the "every kid should to to college" mantra. And I think setting of minimal mathematics and reading requirements for various popular career paths is a wonderful thing. But education talks a good game when it comes to partnering with industry and then, when its crunch time--i.e. when experts are telling you that you need to talk to CompTIA and you say words like "never"--the commitment just isn't there.

So here's what I learned: I think there is actually some real value in the statistical process these people are going through. I totally got it: understood how thoroughly they were committed to the accuracy of the data and the value we were providing. I felt genuinely needed and useful.

But if there isn't a commitment to alignment with what industry is up to, then I don't see how we're going to actually churn out kids who have the chops they need to be successful in a technology program, or obtain an industry certification.

Listen: If you want to work as a CST in the industry, it's important you have a college degree, but it's even more important you have, at minimum, a CompTIA A+ certification, and desirable if you also have a Net+ cert. This is the real value-add for those wanting to work in this industry. The math isn't as important as the certs.

If we're going to progress educationally, it's vitally important we have our eye on industry, but even more important that we understand what industry expects of those who desire to enter it.