Gears of my childhood: simply... paper. Large sheets of white paper used as placeholders for plates in my parent's Lisbon restaurant. Their long working hours meant that I had to spend a lot of time at their workplace and I had to make use of it. After homework, there were always a lot of large white sheets of paper to draw on. I recall spending hours simply drawing elaborate scenes, drawn from my imagination and my fascination with sci fi stuff. There started my love of the arts, of drawing, of all things fantastical in the human imagination. Today I'm a arts/IT teacher, using IT to draw in 3D and other media, teaching my elementary school students stuff such as augmented reality and 3D modeling. But to this day I still fill notebooks with drawings. And yes, I was that typical student who in class was always hunched over sketching instead of paying attention to class. Today, being a teacher, I know how annoying that can be for someone who is making a lot of effort to teach. But when I'm lecturing and I see one of my students drawing, I smile, I remember how to be truly successful in life one has to follow one's passions. Not financially, or professionally, just humanly sucessful. So I look at them, smile, and at the end of the class ask them to show me their work. And tell them never to give up on the creative things that give their lives meaning.
I suppose I could go with other objects... the spitfire toy that inspired my love of airplane aesthetics, or the books that addicted me to literature. The old encyclopedias of the 1920's full of amazing etchings that dazzeld my imagination. But what really influenced me were those blank, white sheets, wich became spaces to play with the mind.
Às voltas com o Learning Creative Learning, o MOOC do MIT onde tenho o privilégio de reler Ito e Resnick, e vê-los em conferências. Infelizmente começou numa altura de excesso de trabalho, mas enfim... tema dois, gears of my childhood, onde após leituras a ideia era reflectir sobre algo significativo da infância que nos modelou como pessoas. No meu caso, humildes folhas de papel branco para colocar nas mesas do restaurante dos meus pais. Folhas que enchi com gigânticas batalhas espaciais em memória do Galactica (ah, os Vipers), Espaço: 1999 ou Era Uma Vez... No Espaço (lembram-se?).
