BlogDale

M’colleague Mark Glover continues to work his ICT designing techno magic. I know I shouldn’t be overtly impressed by tech stuff these days, but every now and then Mark says”have you got 5 minutes” and I know this is going to be a journey of discovery for me into things that I might have known were possible but haven’t had time to try. Today was different; I had no idea the Welsh Wizard was going to come up with this one.

We’ve used No Limits Rollercoasters for a couple of years. It’s a great sim where you build a rollercoaster in a quasi-technical drawing environment, then you get to ride the fearsum beast that you created - and analyse where your passengers would have died due to excessive G force. We introduce a number of topics around it in Year 9; design and analysis; the use of ICT in society and how accurate simulators can save money; the shortcomings of simulators; writing letters/memos to theme park owners; designing leaflets/other advertising blurb including podcasts and vodcasts; costings spreadsheets using goal seek (et al) to find break-even points. And we have some great fun seeing what the students come up with in their rollercoaster designs.

But the great just got better. Since I introduced Wings 3D, Mark has been using his outstanding design skills to get students using it to make ’stuff’. His students won first, second and third with their artistic interpretation at the Shropshire Create IT! awards. I’m looking forward to the day when Second Life gets going around here, because our students will have a huge head start in designing prims in Wings. But I digress.

Today Mark showed me how he can create models in Wings and then import to No Limits. He’s got the techs to do the necessary adjustments to the permissions and locations of various files so students can insert their own models into their rollercoaster designs.

I watched in awe as he created a ghost in Fireworks, imported it to Wings then rendered it with UV mapping and created a 3D model to import to No Limits. Then he did the same with a dragon and a galleon he’d created previously.

So what’s the learning potential? No longer will students create beautiful models that they can admire only in Wings 3D. They will now be able to put them anywhere that there’s a need for 3D objects - I’m thinking games, scenery, creating their own landscapes (Mark’s a wizard in Bryce and Daz Studio). They’ll be visualising and creating their own artefacts in different packages, using the appropriate tools for the job without necessarily seeing any difference between one software package and another. That’s what I call ICT capability. It’s the future.

And there was me worrying about Sketchup licences.  With my predisposition towards free and Open Source software the technicians get a bit twitchy when I ask for some obscure software titles to be added to the network.  So at school we’re going through licences with a magnifying glass, not wanting to get caught out by the small print; when we’ve installed something we want to be sure that as an institution, rather than a single user, we are covered for network-wide installations.

I’ve been a bit glum since I’d spotted a page at Google Sketchup that (I thought) suggested a licence was needed.  Not to worry, we’ll find the cash somehow because this is an awesome product.  So today I phoned Google to make sure, just clutching at straws really before I take the plunge and spend money.  To my surprise I’m informed that it’s OK to download and install the free version across the network!  “Splendid”, says I, and asked for it in writing (keeps the techies happy).  So on Monday I look forward to rolling SketchUp out across the network and writing some schemes of work to make use of it’s astounding features.

Such joy. An online image editor. There have been problems recently with the school network, which means that the software I want installed for creating vector graphics hasn’t been installed. But there’s this clever Ajax app called AjaxSketch that allows graphics to be made online and then saved to the local machine as a scalable vector graphic - the format can be changed with your friendly graphics editor eg GIMP. Trouble is, it needs Firefox to work, which ain’t on the network (yet). Curses, foiled again.  ‘Course, there’s still Gliffy.
While I’m at it, I have to say that I like the latest version of paint.net. Very usable and not at all like Paint. I really don’t like Paint. Another favourite image processor is ArtRage, now in version 2. I even paid for the pro version, I like it so much and I felt the need to support the developers. And here’s another great toy - remember those photomosaic posters that were all the rage a few years back? I’ve recently been playing with AndreaMosaic, a freeware application for creating these fascinating works of art. One great thing is that you can tell the software to create a web page, which links to the original image when you hover over the mosaic cells that contains it.

Old standards for me, I can’t do without Photofiltre and Irfanview for simple image processing. Another useful tool is Resize-o-matic for resizing images with a right click. I’m slowly getting used to Inkscape for vector graphic editing, and it has a great function for converting a raster image to a vector with various controls that can be set to make it dance to your tune.

One thing I can’t wait to get on the school system is Scribus. Waving goodbye to Publisher will be the best day of my life.

While talking about image processing, I can’t fail to mention GIMP again.  I had Year 7 using it a couple of weeks ago to create logos.  Some folks think it’s really hard to learn, but it’s all a matter of approach (as with anything.  HTML is really hard to learn but we still expect kids to learn a bit).