Announcement: Blender Education Badges

Announcements
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Past 2 years the education community worked on a common reference framework for teaching Blender. The foundation of this framework has been described and is ready to go public.

Background

Schools and teachers often differ in their opinions on which topics should be taught and in what order. This becomes a problem whenever schools, teachers, and students try to cooperate, for example in joint projects, student exchange programs, collaboration between teachers, and other cases.

With the Blender Education Badges project, the Blender Education Community wants to address this problem by proposing a shared standard that allows for easily comparing levels of understanding without imposing a rigid structure on those who teach and learn Blender, thereby improving collaboration between schools.

During the project other benefits were identified. For example, having a reference framework also helps teachers to set up their curriculum or helps to explain their curriculum to the school head.

So the goal of the Blender Education Badges project is to create a common reference framework for teaching and learning Blender that still allows everyone to approach Blender in their own way.

History

Having a reference curriculum has long been cherished by the education community. Trying to get consensus via open and public communication led to failure. Too many stakeholders with their own ideas.

After Covid the proposal was raised again at the SIG meeting at the Blender Conference 2022, with a smaller team working on the curriculum and the community validating this.

And so the Blender Badges project started 2 years ago with a small team setting up the reference framework.

At the Blender conference 2023 the added value of education for open source projects like blender was recognized. This was the start of the Blender education website.

This framework and the website were presented at the latest Blender conference where the education community gave their feedback and their approval.

Blender Education Badges project

First fundamentals have been identified. These fundamentals are organized into Foundation badges. Badges are commonly used in Education.

These foundation badges have been described using the docs framework of Blender.

The next steps are:

  • Gather more feedback from the community, schools and teachers.
  • Create really good (video/written) tutorials for the foundation badges with the community. CGCookie will also support us with their tutorials.
  • Create content for the Professional badges
  • Blender Qualification Framework project

You can find the project here:

A preview can be found here: Blender Education Documentation

Blender Qualification Framework project

The reference framework roughly describes what a student should be able to do or should know.

Some teachers need more concrete tools for assessing a student.

The blender qualification framework project is a follow up on the blender badges project and aims to provide such tools.

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Is the projects website public yet? Itā€™s not really clear from within the post if this is a todo or done.

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Given that the poster isnā€™t a foundation member, Iā€™m inclined to doubt this is official, and as such, itā€™s not going to show up on official trackers

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Iā€™m inclined to doubt this is official,

I can nip that one in the bud, only authorized people can place topics in the Announcements category, while iā€™m not entirely up to date with the details of this project, I can assure you the BF people are aware/involved of and suggested the creation of this topic, with a more official announcement on code.blender.org to come in the coming days/weeks/months (Iā€™m honestly not sure what timeline they are looking at)

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I hope students and teachers wonā€™t be ā€˜imposedā€™ to learn areas of blender that have nothing to do with their field of work :thinking:

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No itā€™s not public yet. Itā€™s an announcement to bring the project public. Iā€™ve added the repository and a link to preview the website to the post.

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As mentioned, itā€™s a reference framework, schools/teachers can use and adjust this for their own teaching purpose.

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Indeed itā€™s an official announcement. As mentioned in the post, the Blender Education Community has been/is running this community project. Last year it was discussed with BF that this should become part of Blender.

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Maybe, some wonderful day, BFCT returns, but renewed and in full glory? :slight_smile:

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Fantastic initiative! I love it. Is there a reason why isnā€™t there a ā€œVFXā€ Badge? Iā€™d include there camera/object tracking, view layers and compositor (stuff like greenscreen, masking, cryptomatte layers, AOVs, etc.).

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If i understood correctly, currently only the very few basic fundamentals are identified and covered whith badegs. I think theyā€™ll add intermediate, advanced and expert later on. VFX (part 1) i think would fall into the category of intermediate.
Additionally Topics which i would like to get covered future on, as they would be really helpful when applying to certain jobs or comparing their work references: Rendering & Mesh Optimization, Scripting & Pipelines, Color Theory, Grease Pencil & Sketching/Prototyping, and then some more specialized areas like character design, environment design, etc.

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Minor thing: the word ā€œcurriculumā€ does not appear anywhere in the docs. I think itā€™s important for search indexing to be somewhere, even if thatā€™s not what youā€™re calling it.

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Thanks! The work is not finished. We are still missing a lot. This is just a start. We are still looking for teachers to help out.

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Great ideas! Thereā€™s still a lot of work to do. This is just a start.

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Indeed itā€™s not a curriculum. Schools can use this to create their own curriculum. I do see your point. Need to look into thisā€¦

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Going to be fun keeping it current and correct. For example on just taking one quick look at: Animation Foundation Level 0 - Blender Education Documentation

We have, ā€œI - key to bring up Insert Keyframe Menu in 3D Viewport and to add a keyframeā€

Thing is, itā€™s now the K key in Blender 4.2.

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Before we go into details like should level 1 have this or level 2 that, what ARE the badges?
Like, how do they work?

After I complete lesson and they prove they can make tree of cubes I give them Modeling 1 badge? How do they use those badges? what is the point of them? Iā€™m saying in big picture, because I understand value of them in course as motivational mechanism, but like can they use those badges anywhere? Basic badges like ā€œknows cylinder and coneā€ is obviously not useful either way, but assuming weā€™ll have more advanced badges too, like ā€œcan sculpt skin details and bake on normals maps of low-poly characterā€.

Can they show those badges anywhere? like on CV? and who checks if theyā€™re authentic or they just snapped a PNG? If I give badges, who checks if Iā€™m qualified for that? Is it only for accredited universities?

Or are badges for teachers? I donā€™t know.

Without sounding rude, I genuinely donā€™t understand what badges are. What is the purpose of them? I appreciate the write up, but it feels more like a sales pitch than proposal. After reading it twice (and website too) I donā€™t understand what is proposed at all.

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Hello !
very interesting project !

I have some questions:

  • who can assign/release the badges ?
  • what are the ā€œProfessional badgesā€?
  • Can a single professional educator release/assign the badges ?
  • Does the school ( or the single professional ) have to be certificated/qualified to release the badges ( like old BFCT )?
  • Do you have more info about ā€œBlender Qualification Framework projectā€
  • will the Education Badges be connected with Blender ID, and so visible in the communities like forum, developer, etcā€¦ ?
  • How we can contribute to the initiative ?

I tried to access to the Chat but it is not accessible for me ( #blender-education is not accessible at this time. ):

For now and for what i see, the badges are licensed CC0 and based on a ā€œcommon reference frameworkā€ so everyone can use it in freedom for what i understand:

Thank you !

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Thanks for pointing this out. Added this to the badge.

This is indeed a big challenge. Especially because schools donā€™t upgrade often.

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talking about the Badges graphic i find not immediate to understand ( from UX perspective ) the Badges level with " Roman numerals" ( in my personal opinion ):

  • if i see the sequence of three Badges with different levels i understand clearly that there are three levels :"I, II, III "
  • but if i see a single Badge, it is not immediate to understand that I,II, III are Badges level numbers.

I would prefer 1, 2, 3

for example if i imagine to see this Badge alone it is not immediate ( without thinking ) to understand that II is 2:

https://blender-education.esmo.uber.space/docs/blender_badges/modeling/foundation-badge-level-2/

also the level 1 Badge for animation is different from levels 2 and 3 ( beside I, II, III ), so it could be confusing:

https://blender-education.esmo.uber.space/docs/blender_badges/animation/

anyway very interesting project and quite challenging !
good work !

1 Like