About the Instructor
Martin McDonald is a professional digital artist withe experience working on video games, TV shows, and film. He primarily focuses in character animation in both 2D and 3D. He graduated from Massachusetts College of Art and Design with a degree in Animation and is a Massachusetts Licensed Teacher in Visual Arts. He finds great joy in learning all he can and teaching others all they want to know to help them better turn their dreams into reality. He has an entire library of random bit of interesting information from a wide variety of different subjects such as History, Science, Math, and Linguistics.
About Empow Studios
Empow Studios brings technology, arts, and play together to help young learners discover and build on their creative talents.
It’s a well-known belief that the need for specialized skills in technology and computer science are ever-growing. Our goal is to empower kids to create projects that they are proud to share with family & friends. Whether that's designing, building, coding, or a combination of all three, every kid should have the opportunity to learn the empowering tools within digital art, computer science, and engineering, which can potentially spark interests for future ambitions in STEM.
Empow’s learning philosophy based on creative play borrows from John Dewey’s instrumentalism, Piaget’s constructivism, and Papert’s constructionism in asserting that passions, perceptions, and experience play a crucial role in how a person builds and maintains his or her understanding of the world. Even in the supposedly coldly rational world of STEM, love and play drive learning. They are what makes our lives meaningful, worthwhile, and fun. That’s where we start.
Today, much of that creative play (and future work) takes place in digital, virtual, and robotic environments. Empow Studios supports not only active participation and developing literacy in that playground, but also self-efficacy and creativity. Empowering kids means giving them the tools not only to navigate their future landscapes, but be active and intentional creators of it.
What do you want to MAKE today?