A Start For Kids By Customized Restriction Of Functionality?

[Pappenheimer]

I'm teaching kids, pupils, beginners in general, in doing some modeling and animation work. Those are mainly courses that last one week where the kids produce a small game.

http://www.wuerfels-welt.de/page_workshops.html

For now, I do this with an easier tool than blender.

But I would like to use blender for this, because with some prefabs the beginners could get astonishing results by using very few of blender's tool's.

The problem is that each beginner is doomed to hit buttons with unforeseeable results.

Is there a way to make a "restricted setting", where the teacher chooses the buttons that are available only? All other functions except choosing a different "restricted setting" are disabled and grayed out?

I wished the restricted setting is somehow like this where you set "SR:1-Animation", "SR:2-Model"...

This is a great way to establish blender to be used even by kids.

[kakapo]

with blender 2.5x it's possible since there the gui is defined with customizable python scripts.

[Pappenheimer]

Hm. I don't think that I will find any time soon, to dig into the architecture of blender. I was hoping that there is a simple way for those, who are already familiar with that, know an easy way to implement such a functionality.

Maybe, I should simply wait for the final 2.5, I'm still using 2.49b at the moment.

Thanks for your answer!

[way2insane]

Just did a google search for blender tutorials for kids and this popped up.
Is this been implented yet...or does the user still have to dive in with python to make this happen?

[stiv]

This thread is from 2010 which suggests not much has happened. The Blender development effort is mainly focused on increasing the awesomeness of Blender (see latest release notes) rather than limiting its functionality.

In the 2.6x series, both the UI and the actions are much more scriptable via Python. If I were me and wanted to make a 'simple' Blender, I would create an add-on with the desired limited functionality.

As a side note, someone best not named once proposed Stupid Blender - it had a single object, a red Cube that you could drag around to set key frames for animation, and one button that, when pressed, rendered that animation to video.