Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality

Today's session was an introduction to Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR).  Surprisingly none of the students new what AR was but when we discussed it some more they realised that they have been using it without actually knowing what it was!

Using unity the students controls turned into gloves.  They were challenged select different shapes and build something with it.  It was quite tricky!

Using AR the students were able to make the merge cube come alive and were able to build blocks on top of it.

The students chose a picture to colour.  They then put the iPad over top of the picture to make it come to life!  They got a real surprise to see how it interacted

Quiver is a great app that has lots of Educational options to relate to themes in the classroom

The volcano erupted.                                                            Wow the world map turned into a globe!

Animation

After spending the term working with small groups teaching them the basics of animation- I took the whole class for the day and we got to put all of the learning into practise.

Room 5 put all of their great knowledge about Animation into their own creative story.  After they had planned what their story was going to be about they created a storyboard and came up with ideas of how they would present it.

                                                                    We used plasticine

                                            Some of us had a go at using green screen with an iPad

Using a book as a background was great- using small plastic toys and pieces were easy to work with.

                                        Retelling a well known story using paper characters was very effective

                                            This lego animation was exactly the same as the storyboard so we were able to                                                                              follow it easily.

                                                Working with lego and plasticine worked well

                It was important to get the camera set up perfectly so it would only capture the scene.
 

All of the animations turned out really well and were all very different.  The class were very proud presenting and sharing them to the class as well as others throughout the school.  Adding the title and credits at the end was a nice touch that some of them did if they had enough time.

Scratch - Coding, using video sensing

Today's computational thinking session I introduced the video sensing extension blocks.

We coded to pat the cat, pop the balloon and then made a band with a cymbal and drum.  The kids had so much fun been interactive with their coding.

 

Code Spark App

This is the progression lesson from the unplugged lesson on algorithms and using arrows to guide the Kid bots around the grid. 

We discussed what we did last time and looked at how we needed to use the directional arrows to guide the Detective to the donuts!

We had lots of fun using the touch screen TV as well.

Tangram Puzzles

 The Junior Classes began their lesson looking at Tangram Puzzles.

The objective was looking at decomposition- realising that problems are made up of small bits.  They worked together to make a new pattern using all of the shapes.  The tricky part was getting the shapes back into the square again.  It took lots of resilience and collaboration. 

Virtual Reality and CoSpace

The Senior classes have been working on creating a scene with animals. The Junior school are doing a topic based theme about animals and the rain forest.

Once they had chosen their theme they researched some key facts about animals which they entered as information into their environment.  Adding animation, sound and movement through coding made their spaces interesting and appealing for a young audience to view.

Seeing their spaces come to live through the VR gave them a real buzz to see all of their hard work come to life.

Unplugged Junior Lesson

The fruit game

The children start with a piece of fruit in their hand and the idea is for them to pass them around the circle with their friends and try and get the other piece of fruit so they have a pair.

This involved them having to collaborate and co operate and come up with a system that worked. 

Lego Build

This involved giving clear and precise instructions to see if their partner was able to build the same object out of lego as them.  They learnt that sometimes what they thought was a clear instruction was not!  They began to understand that it was important to be precise with the size, colour and shape and the position that each lego needed to go.  We had mixed results but each time they got better.  They also needed to listen very well!

We could see where we went wrong and debugged.

This team had success and worked well together listening and following instructions.

Coding the Plushie

We looked at direction and finding the best algorithm to get the Robot Kid  to the plushie

We discovered that some of our instructions were not clear to follow

 It was easier when we used arrows and showed direction.

Animation

We have begun to look at animation.  We started off as a whole class and discussed animations we have watched.  After we viewed a short film of Wallace and Gromit we shared what we noticed.

The first step is to create a thaumatrope - we used two pictures opposite each other when we spun them fast the images blended into one another giving the illusion that the bird was in the cage or the fish was in the bowl.

Claymation

Using the camera on their chromebook they set up their stage 

Groups were given the task to make their ball roll, make their snake slither and make their clay grow.

Once they had viewed their work they downloaded the Clap motion app from the google chrome store.

They used a story board to draw their plan for their story.

The juniors used letters and an ipad to animate spelling words.  They started with their names.

Creating bookmarks by following instructions

Making the bookmarks also worked with the younger class.  I adapted my plan by getting them to go through the process step by step as a whole class, we wrote up the instructions together on the whiteboard and used less words and more pictures. 

Using googly eyes and cutting out our parts for the face worked better as than drawing freehand.