VIDEO FRIDAYS: Part 1: Learn to Draw – Getting Started

Noting the unexpected direction(s) of the past few months of the school year would hardly be noteworthy given how the whole year has gone. Beginning last March it has been one long series of evaluations and re-evaluations about what our goals are and what is really important and essential  as we fight to move forward. A lot that we took for granted isn’t available, a lot may never come back. Fortunately for me, my approach to teaching and especially teaching tech has never been about repeating what came before or “going through the motions.” We’re never been here before. These circumstances, expectations and challenges haven’t been a part of anyone’s curriculum ever.

So, given one’s expertise in working with children, one’s experiences working online and what people are capable of accomplishing, despite the circumstances, you move forward. And sometimes you move forward into areas where you used to call “home” decades ago. At least that’s been my experience teaching my robotics students about using the design process and finding myself drawing sketches of floor plans and office chairs and robots, things I haven’t much done since leaving high school in 1976. All that’s missing from my sketches is sketches of rockets and monsters.

Thus, it made perfect sense that the following video would pop up in my feed, a video about getting started sketching. I sincerely hope that doing sketches as a form of note-taking, problem solving and design work will continue to be a regular part of my weekly work. As a matter of fact, later today I’ll be working with my robotic students thinking through how to use bionic-robotics to create artificial limbs using sketching. After the Learn to Draw video, I’ll post the video my students will view about one of the best when it came to invention and creativity through sketching, Leonardo da Vinci. Enjoy.