The weather changed decidedly early this morning in Boulder.. back to a crisp Fall day with lots of wind and fall leaves blowing about. Today’s more seasonable Fall weather called for a real breakfast, and I knew just the place…
8:00am Breakfast at Luciles
One our first FormFonts team meetings was in Luciles at the first SketchUp Basecamp, so it brought back fond memories. Locals also tell me it’s one of Boulder’s best restaurants. This Louisiana style cafe is just a half block from the Rembrandt, so I stopped by for some Eggs Eisenhower and sausage.
Breakfast at Luciles in Boulder, Co. A local institution. The ketchup and hotsauce are homemade, and both are delicious. The staff claim the secret to the ketchup is just a bit of hot-sauce and cinnamon.
9:00am 3D Basecamp Design Charrette
Aidan introduces the design charrette atop yet another folding table. The backstory is that when the team went to Bryn Fosburgh to get Basecamp approved, they explained it was a very non-tradition conference. You know… We don’t need no stinking badges!
Bryn Fosburgh said.. “Fine, Do it! I just have one condition..”. Everyone held their breath as he went on to explain that he wanted the SketchUp team to find a local non-profit and do a design charrette around something that charity needed.
Additionally, half (~ $10,000) of the conference registration fees are being donated to the same organization. Bryn didn’t get where he is today without being a quick study. He ‘gets’ the SketchUp zeitgeist, and the team was greatly relieved. They all expected to have to wear Trimble polo-shirts for the duration!
The chosen organization is Impact On Education (IOE). Their Executive Director Fran Ryan quickly got up on the folding table and explained the group’s mission. Boulder is pretty wired, but taking advantage of tech in education is not as easy as we might have it.
IOE has a $350K initiative with 50 schools in the Boulder Valley to ‘teach the teachers’. They teach them how to do lesson planning around all these i-gizmos everyone is giving them. IOE’s focus is to make tablets and mobile tech enhance science, math and reading for the “kiddos” in the classroom.
9:00am to 11:30am Design Challenges
Challenge Option One: A wired, wireless classroom for the next 50 years.
Prototypical Classroom to accommodate 40 kiddos, more than one teacher, and all of the screens, devices and cables currently necessary for creating a digital learning environment.
Challenge Option Two: A system for organizing portable devices
Design a system for managing, storing, charging, staging, and repairing and otherwise wrangling the plethora of electric gizmos in the classroom.
About 20 teams of between 5-10 attendees participated in the charrette, and the deliverables are as many 11×17 pages in PDF format as you can muster by 11:30am.
To assist in early ideation, each team was given a starter kit of tracing paper, crayons, and large sheets of paper. SketchUp’s Aidan Chopra and a happy customer pictured above.
Unfortunately, I had to leave for the airport before the winners were announced, but we’ll get a link up when the entries are on SketchUp’s website. The winning teams will get a Makerbot Rep2 replicator, but how 5 people are going to timeshare the device remains to be seen.
Overview of Tuesday’s Un-Conference
Here is a little more background on the unconference, which was getting a bit of mixed reviews by others having breakfast this morning. This is the bulletin-board of all proposed sessions.
The unconference session types basically broke down into three types. The first type was “Discussion of Ideas”, as below..
Other types of unconference session included User-to-User Presentations (below), and Commercial Product Presentations (below below).
In short: SketchUp is back! The band is back together, and everyone’s a bit older, greyer but also wiser. We all needed this group-hug in Boulder to reassure the faithful and reinvigorate a new crop of super-user enthusiasts.
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