Robert F. Evans
The course I teach is called Drafting and is introductory in nature, offered to all students as an elective subject in grades 9-12. The student may or may not have had any previous drafting experience. The year-long course is divided into four marking periods. Each unit during the year is designed to improve basic drafting and learning skills. Basic drafting techniques require the proper use of tools and symbolic knowledge.
Learning skills require reading, writing, and arithmetic to be integrated as building blocks and objectives of the units. It is my objective to show how architecture could be used as a thread connecting all of these skills and allowing the student to express goals in a visual form. The more I tried to isolate the topic of architecture as a unit the more ways I found to use it in each unit.
In order to enable the student to design an environment one should have a working vocabulary of design terminology. The term architecture gives infinite possibilities for definition depending on the school of thought one is introduced to. Architecture has many definitions but very little meaning in or beyond the classroom for the average student. I propose that experience at a personal level can be an effective means of bringing architecture into the real world of the student. The student should be able to design and organize personal space by completing necessary plans and elevations, perspective and detail drawing of a given or proposed space while using imagination to tie it to career and life goals.
(Recommended for Grades 9 through 12 Drafting)
Key Words
Architecture Basic Principles Geometry Personal Space Mathematics
