March 1

Hi there. My name is Leon. Anyways, class was okay again. We worked in the math teacher's classroom again where all the laptop are. Working with computers makes class feel fast, turning on the computers, opening files, saving, etc all take time. I thought I was imagining people last week, but the class really did get bigger! There's six or so new kids, where did they come from?? Anyways, we introduced Keynote to them. We made sure they knew what Keynote was made for (presentations), but also showed them how to be resourceful and use it for designing. They manipulated text, masked images, rotated and scaled objects, and added effects. Basically, every skill or concept we taught them on paper could now be done on the computer. Like every class, we gave them handouts. This lesson's handouts were pretty cool, if I do say so myself. Six pages of great looking info about cover design and Keynote tips. Of course the class period was too short again. We managed to get a basic layout for each cover done, but not much design. Next week will be interesting, we're going an extra day to get thing moving. I feel like we need to focus less on skills and spend more time designing. Design design designers. Design is difficult to teach. I don't think I would understand the importance of design myself at that age. It's not that design concepts is difficult to understand, it just takes alot of time and effort being immersed in design to realize that good design has less to do with looks and style than about creativity and intelligence. All this skill building and making things pretty is relatively insignificant. How do you inspire young people to make things that are smart and creative? I'm quite surprised at how many of them are content with using the default font.