8-Year-Olds Creating Digital Art

Creating Digital Art

For a while now, we have only been teaching graphic design to fourth graders and up. For lower classes we had our students use Potato Guy, an application to learn drag and drop skills. For Potato Guy the goal is to dress a potato.

I had always wondered how young is too young to introduce our students to Inkscape. At the moment we thought fourth graders were the youngest. So today we decided to experiment with second graders. They are about eight years old.

The Youngest Artists

I was particularly impressed with Allan, a second grader who drew a person wearing a green shirt and white pants. His design was so detailed with black hair, brown skin, one white shoe and the other shoe was barefoot. Of each of the colors, he had to pick the specific colors from the color wheel.

Most students had no problem using Inkscape. Now I am excited to try Inkscape with even the youngest of our students.