A big thank-you to Richard Bensley for this tutorial, and to Richard Lewis for arranging a venue. I never knew I was a spaceship designer and human sculptor! Okay, perhaps I'm not, but I had a lot of fun, and it was very interesting to play with something outside my usual use of Linux. And Richard explained this tricky material both well and with enthusiasm.
I think the format worked well: The presenter instructed the class and a helper with a computer on the projector, the class brought laptops, and the presenter could use the whiteboard, walk around to troubleshoot etc. With tea and biscuits, what more could you want :-)
Tip: Blender uses the numeric keypad heavily, so make sure it works, or for best effect use an external keyboard. Mine didn't work, fortunately I could do a hardware swap with Joe (ta!). I managed to fix my laptop this morning with this voodoo: http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/How_to_get_special_keys_to_work#NumLock The other problem my laptop encountered was a box mode select graphics card driver issue (just like http://img296.imageshack.us/img296/3593/problemtj6.png) that I haven't fixed yet.
-- Martijn