So I get invited to go to the Autodesk University (AU) conference in Las Vegas the week of 11-28 - 12-2, 2011. What a wonderful thing! Autodesk paid for my airfare, hotel, and admittance to the conference--probably close to $4K dropped on me right there. While there Autodesk bought everyone breakfast and lunch most days, paid for a boatload of wine, beer and appetizers at their various mixers, treated all of us to special speakers, classes and forums. There were sweet deals on tee-shirts and other Autodesk memorabilia. I won a flash drive in a Wheel of Fortune thing at a vendor's booth.
What a great time.
The only thing I was required to do was attend the Autodesk Educator's Advisory Board the last night of the conference, which I did. Oh, and there's this: I had to have a PowerPoint document prepared that showed at least one Autodesk STEAM project I had run my students through.
STEAM is the free online curriculum Autodesk has created for K-12 and post-secondary educators. It's fabulous stuff. There are three levels of short and sweet how-to movies, lots of different PDF documents dealing with various issues such as design and architecture and then, in level three, there are the projects.
Here's the thing: I was so inundated by various emails from Autodesk that I either somehow ignored the request for a project PowerPoint earlier on or didn't see it until very late in the game, right before we were due to fly out to the conference. So the little tiny bit I did prepare was nonsense and fluff: my name, and a couple of cartoons. Nothing at all about any STEAM project.
But sadly and honestly, I didn't really do any STEAM project with my students. To be fair, I thought that Autodesk wanted my input on how I chose to teach my students how to use Maya--one of the company's 3D modeling and animation tools (a superb one). I didn't realize they wanted my input on how I implemented one of their STEAM projects.
I did go through the STEAM videos with the kids and we did some of the earlier stuff. For example, there's a good lesson in there about how to use basic shapes to create any architecture you like. It's a great little tutorial because it shows kids all about polygons and the technique of extrusion, two of the fundamental pieces of knowledge one has to have to start using Maya in any meaningful way.
But the way I have chosen to teach Maya up to now has been through an extremely well-crafted tutorial web site called Digital Tutors. The tutorial movies are information-dense, rich in the ability to get kids engaged in a Maya dialog, and project-centric.
I go through the movies with the kids. I tell them "I'm a big dummy when it comes to Maya, so I'd like to learn right along with you, if that's OK." (This is only partially true: I somewhat know my way around Maya. I have a goal this year to professionally certify in the product.) The kids love it because they can correct me when I do wrong things because I'm old and stupid and don't get this technical stuff. Their correcting me actually works to my benefit because it reinforces what we're trying to learn.
The Maya interface is an incredibly busy beehive of various sections, sub-sections, buttons, panels, windows and all kinds of navigation elements. Just learning the UI takes some doing. The STEAM training videos, while short and sweet, don't go quite far enough, in my opinion, in teaching the UI. (Contrarily, the Digital Tutors videos may spend a bit too much time with the idiosyncrasies of the UI.)
Whatever.
So the Maya project I saw demonstrated dealt with downloading an art asset someone else had created and working through the process of creating a sheet of paper that, when scanned by a smart phone, caused the asset to pop up on the screen. Cool, but nearly useless from a game development standpoint.
So I tried to show what I was up to with Maya by showing attendees the work my students had done on a Flash game, and then pointing out that we wanted to replicate the work in Maya and Unity, a great 3D game development platform in which one can port their game to the web.
I talked about kids who worked hundreds of hours in Maya on eyes, and sculpting, and creating lifelike buildings that you could navigate through using Unity.
But to no avail. I lost my audience as soon as I showed them Flash. I couldn't talk enough about the coolness of what we were doing with Maya, or the inroads the kids were making with the product, or the fact that not one, but two of my students have declared majors in 3D Modeling and Animation at the University of Colorado at Denver (UCD).
I didn't have a PowerPoint to show any of this. I didn't have screen shots of the kids' work, or photos of them working on the project, or storyboards, or anything else like that.
All I had was the Flash game and anecdotal stuff, and I just didn't do a good job explaining.
I made a serious mistake in all of it as well. I tried looking cool, quoting something from the book "Wikinomics" in which the authors say the Internet is the world's biggest brain: meaning that kids go to the Internet for the majority of training we educators don't give them. And that's true.
But somehow I must've made it sound as though I trust the Internet to teach kids (I do sometimes)--but as though I give carte blanche trust (I don't).
A student from the Netherlands attending the meeting shot me down pretty effectively. "To say the Internet is a great teacher is a disservice. There's a lot of bad stuff on the web, and educators are the caretakers, pointing out what is good and what is nonsense."
All true. But not the intent of what I was trying to get at with that phrase. But the game was all lost by then.
In retrospect I should have just said: "I'm sorry folks. I just haven't had enough time to prepare anything formal. Can I email my PowerPoint to you later?" This would have been truthful and I think I would have met with more respect from my peers and colleagues than I did with my BS-artist presentation, somehow thinking I could talk them through the work we've done. Others did more talking than presenting, why couldn't I, I reasoned.
So today I feel old, useless, and stupid. My poor performance at the advisory board meeting caused me to question everything I'm doing in the classroom, and if I'm actually making any kind of a different anywhere I'm at. Life questions. Do I have validity on the planet?
OK, I know, that's a pity party. I know I'm doing good. But I just wish I'd use my head more (a trait for which I supremely respect my wife), think and react quickly on my feet (wife again), and come up with better answers to problems.
Alas: a bittersweet conference, with not at all any outcomes I had expected. Except a couple of cool tee-shirts.
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