Showing posts with label marina ninza. Show all posts
Showing posts with label marina ninza. Show all posts

Saturday, May 14, 2011

Inside Story

Il rimpianto è il vano pascolo di uno spirito disoccupato. 
Bisogna soprattutto evitare il rimpianto 
occupando sempre lo spirito con 
nuove sensazioni e nuove immaginazioni. 
Gabriele d'Annunzio
A Roman Count in love with Art itself, a Sicilian family at odds with destiny, a smoker struggling wittily with his conscience, and a madman who returns to sanity, only to find himself trapped in an elaborate hoax. Four turn-of-the-20th century tales from Italian Literature with one thing in common - they have all been brought to life in Craft.
Marina Ninza teaches literature at the Ernesto Balducci Institute in Pontassieve, near Florence. In Italy, kids have options, when it comes to what kind of liceo or High School they attend; glamorous sounding options like classico, linguistico, artistico. The Ernesto Balducci is a liceo scientifico. Kids who choose this option are more into chemistry than classics, as you can imagine, so Marina's challenge is to find a way to get her students interested in texts that matter.
Marina Ninza:  We've used a lot of approaches to present the material, including ebooks and video games. I had the idea to recreate the settings in 3D. We're just getting started, it's a joint venture with the Computer department. This year, there were only a couple of computers and four avatars for the students to use in the classroom, so it's not as hand-on as we would like, and we live in the country, so a lot of the students don't have broadband at home.
The four builds are on sim Pindaro, donated by Craft owners Tao Quan and Licu Rau. Tao took charge of building  the house with the Nespolo tree, from verga's  I Malavoglia. The famous courtyard is full of charming little details, like the hen house, the bread oven, and round fishing nets.
Tao Quan: I'd never heard of the book before I started this build, but there is a lot of information on the internet and the teacher helped me too. The children aren't online very much, and are still learning cam skills, so if you look at the garden, you may see some of the vegetables floating above the ground!