Google partners with Figma to bring design tools to student Chromebooks - The Verge

Google has announced a new partnership with Figma to equip student Chromebooks with free collaborative design tools.

Google for Education has announced a new partnership with Figma. The companies will bring Figma’s design and prototyping platform as well as its collaborative whiteboarding app FigJam to education Chromebooks. Schools can apply now to the beta program, which will begin over the summer.

Verge reporter Dami Lee described Figma as “Google Docs for design.” Like Google’s software, Figma is primarily web-based and is a lighter load for a computer to run than many industry-standard creative programs. Figma also allows team members to collaborate in a way that is similar to how they might in Google Docs — but on prototypes and design projects rather than text. Users can add annotations and notes to projects, mark things with stickers, and even communicate through audio chat. Think of it sort of like a less powerful Adobe Illustrator, but collaborative, online, and sometimes better for app and web design.

The two companies hope the program, which will be free of charge for schools, will help make software engineering and design more accessible to younger students. “Computer science has not been the most accessible field over the years,” says Andy Russell, who leads product for Chrome OS Education. Russell hopes that Figma’s software will flatten the learning curve for students interested in trying the disciplines out while also giving them advanced tools to work with down the line. “Figma enables students to get in at the ground level with a low floor, but then gives them this extraordinarily high ceiling,” Russell says. He hopes the program will help to “graduate them into the next generation of software designers and software engineers.”

Even outside of those niches, Russell hopes that students can use the software for projects across disciplines. “We all grew up with the five-paragraph essay,” Russell says. But, “students today have so many other options: they can create timelines, they can create infographics, they can create storyboards for documentary film, they can create 3D models of architecture, an application to solve a problem, they can create a website.” He added, “Figma is an amazing tool that’s open-ended for students to be able to create any of those assets.”

The past few years have, unsurprisingly, seen demand for collaborative, cloud-based software (and whiteboarding features in particular) grow. Though schools have reopened following the widespread closures of the early pandemic, many are continuing to invest in online services. It’s also become more common for districts to issue students laptops over the years, increasing expectations that students might collaborate on and submit assignments online.

https://www.theverge.com/2022/6/7/23157093/google-chromebook-students-figma-figjam-partnership

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