Event Details
The Utah Black Chamber of Commerce and Microsoft’s Nonprofit Tech Acceleration (NTA) team provided an exciting, educational, innovative, and cultural set of activities, exhibits, and educational engagements for the NBA All-Star Week of 2023.
What happened?
The Puma creative team brought an Adobe Illustrator file with some shoe and apparel designs. They worked with students to help create their own design in using the Adobe Creative Cloud on Microsoft Surface Pro computers. In another station an Artist worked with students to create in Photoshop using brushes and a blank canvas. Students ranged from about 5th - 10th grades.
Create Utah Advantage
Students came to the event with their school issued logins already connected to the Adobe Creative Cloud. This made all the difference in the activities of the day as Microsoft and Adobe paired up to install Photoshop and Illustrator with out needing to worry about licenses as students had their own already. This meant that all the work was saved to their own personal Creative Cloud and assets we automatically transferred to the students account.
The team at Microsoft ended up sending the Surface Pro Laptop's home with our Utah students at the end of the day. Because they have a license to Creative Cloud they will be able to use Adobe tools just like they learned in the workshop immediately.
The Puma Creative Team and Microsoft team is looking for more opportunities with other areas where students have full access to Creative Cloud to work with Adobe. They commented on how easy it was to just log in and start helping kids create. They highlighted it as one of their most successful events largely due to the simplicity of students being enabled ahead of time to have access to the software.
In all the event was great for the kids learning as the technology got out of the way and provided an opportunity to focus on their design and creative process. The State of Utah's investment in students shined through in this experience and is a model of how other schools can provide opportunities for students to express themselves in a digital way. The ubiquitous access and the gift of the Surface Pro's results in kids being able to continue learning and developing Digital Skills.