Re: Seeing is believing
Like you Sheff when I was teaching in Scotland and doing Standard Grade & Higher Graphical Communication. I had to have a publishing programme for students for their work. In Scotland after starting using BBC Master's the whole country then went over to Mac's because of their graphical interface but they were far too expensive so it was the turn of the PC's to take over. As the order of the day was to try and get as many students as possible at their own terminal. Now I was the principal teacher of technical and had different uses of computers, like 2D CAD drawing, so we had stayed longer with BBC type Acorn computers but eventually had to go over to PC's and I found Xara by chance. Well my teachers took to it as we were coming from Artworks and so did the pupils doing extremely well in their exams, best results in Scotland, in Standard Grade 4 grades higher than they achieved in Maths and English all from a silly priced programme called Xara. The school bought a site license from Xara for 72 computers in the late 90's for again a silly price of, I think, £400. I even got promotion for 2 years as a national development officer in my subject because of the schools results. This meant I went around Scotland showing teachers how I delivered my subject, advising the education authorities what resources each department needed and I also developed classroom exemplar materials which were distributed throughout Scotland.
Now, I met resistance throughout Scotland using Xara, all because it was too cheap to do a proper job, as most of the schools at that time used AutoCad Lt which rendered objects in a 3D space very simply and it cost an arm and a leg. This meant that departments could only afford a few computers to have the software and created bottlenecks to render drawings. Gone are those days now as schools are given free copies of AutoDesk Inventor by AutoCad and it is a terrific programme to draw and render sketches and to produce precision drawings. This means that there is no mention of Adobe, no PS or AI, all because AutoCad had the facility to foresee if you give a student tools when they are young they will want to continue using that software if they become designers, engineers, architects or create business people who can present their products properly and will pay the proper price to do so. I think that makes business sense by Autocad and will make them money and it will lead to companies that can hire students straight from university who will have the ability without much help to do a days work, be able to use, read and even design things.
Design is thinking made visual.
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