The last few years were very important for Blender, with the introduction of brand new
and impressive features and, consequently, an increased professional usability.
One of the most evident (and good...) characteristic of Blender are its differences from
any other similar tool. This can easily become a significant problem in teaching
Blender as key of a course if students already have experience of other (often
commercial) tools, used in schools.
The Industrial Design courses of Politecnico di Torino introduced Blender in didactics
three years ago, replacing all other 3D tools. The first problem we faced was to identify
new ways to introduce Blender to students to overcome the aforementioned problem.
Not only the interface area was touched by a special teaching approach: nodes,
materials, outliner, UV mapping are only some of the important parts where Blender is
different and where it is most important to work for an improved learning experience.
A special part of this job is focused on the documentation: being open, Blender offers a
lot of resources and our hundreds of students can be involved in this area of work with a
new active approach in the creation of documentation, wiki and specific tutorials.
The paper will be a presentation of the results of our experience, focusing the attention
on what is useful to do in teaching Blender, but especially in what the students can do for
the actively growing Blender community.

by Fabrizio Valpreda and Gianluca Faletti (ITALY)